Categorising the digital avant garde

Categorising the Digital Avant Garde alexander farr 090163386

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Alexander Farr

or, An Analytical Study of the Digital Avant-Garde and Their Approaches to Visualising and Realising Architecture in the Digital Age.

Alexander Farr

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Part I: The Digital Society 1-1 Introduction 1-2 Why does the Digital Matter?

1-3 The Society of Flows, Globalisation & Regionalism 1-4 The Digitals Effect on Traditional Living & Typologies 1-5 Using Data Visualisations to Analyse Societal Change 1-6 Defining Approaches of Digital Architectures 1-7 Other Defining Systems: Jones’s Big Forking Dilemma 1-8 Conclusion

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Part II: The Digital Avant-Garde 2-1 Introduction 2-2 Peter Eisenman: City of Culture of Galicia 2-3 Greg Lynn: Cardiff Bay Opera House 2-4 MVRDV: The Regionmaker 2-5 BIG: 8 House 2-6 Conclusion

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Part III: Bibliography 3-1 Reference List 3-2 Books & Online Articles 3-3 Website & Video Resources 3-4 Image Resources

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Part IV: Appendices 4-1 Examples of Architects’ Usage of Digital Methods /57 4-2 Blog Archive - Research & Development /59

CONTENTS

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Part I The Digital Society

Alexander Farr

Alexander Farr

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1-1 Introduction In the wake of deconstructivism and post-modernism in contemporary architectural circles, new methods and techniques have arisen, largely following two major axes - formal exploration and functional experimentation. The development of these routes of exploration have converged over time to create a broad grouping of architects defined here as the digital avant-garde. These architects work within a large range of influences and outputs, though are commonly defined and grouped by their usage and reactionary responses to digital technology and the enablement that such technology is providing to society.

However, arguably the system defining these groups of architects is largely static and discreet in its tackling of the flexible and networked working practices of the architects in question. As such, this study seeks to articulate the positioning of these architects with regard to their influences and inputs in a new, flexible and interweaved system.

The first section investigates why these architects are working in this field of analysis, what this new society means, and the ways it is being expressed, together with ways in which both designers are visualising new systems, and some ways in which architects are creating responses. The second section will apply the initial studies to investigating four case studies in greater depth, analysing their approach towards the digital era, as well as exploring the success of the proposed system of analysis.

INTRODUCTION 1-1

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1-2 Why does the Digital Matter?

“the significance of a medium is the change in pace and scale it brings to human affairs.” (McLuhan, cited in, Harris and Taylor, 2005: p.89)

We are moving into a new era. One that affects societal relations at all levels, from the individual to the global. Like the steam age and the car in the 20th Century, we are struggling to adjust to a new revolutionary system: the internet, and by extension, the digital world that enables it.

Additionally, this new device has caused an information explosion, an exponential growth of data, and “this speeding up is directly related to the increasing ubiquity and availability of media, digital or otherwise” (Gere, 2008: p.209).

The physical dimension is finding its influence pushed into a niche as industry is outsourced and managed digitally, shopping is handled over the net and delivered in a van and social communication is done impersonally and asynchronously (Mitchell, 1995). In this regard we can see how our working and leisure lives are being altered: it is becoming increasingly common to work from home, or shop without leaving the house. These changes are bringing a shift in the traditional typologies our built environment revolves around, for example the decrease in physical books changing our libraries, and internet shopping creating consumer-less warehouses of goods ready for delivery.

1-2 WHY DOES THE DIGITAL MATTER?

For the architect, there are two main drivers for their investment in this new societal system. As previously mentioned, the digital era is altering our core typologies, and the architect, therefore, has to be able to react to these changes. By understanding what these new factors mean, the architect can predict and create new architectures which understand and foresee our new ways of living and innovate rather than respond to societal changes.

The other driver for the architect is the technology that is being developed alongside the changes they are causing. New software is enabling architects to visualise their designs in much more photo-real forms than ever before, but also gather and evaluate raw data in much more innovative ways. A conglomeration of the two is achieved in new programs that merge realtime visualisation and data manipulation, such as NURBs curve creation and parametric software, for the live updating of complex relations.

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1-3 The Society of Flows, Globalisation, and Regionalism The digital era is unavoidable. We are increasingly faced by the proliferation of smart phones, tablets, laptops and constant connectivity. This connection has fundamentally altered the paradigm of work and leisure time and the barrier which divided them. Additionally, the rise of connectivity has created new possibilities for international businesses and corporations, with close spatial relationships no longer compulsory.

Constant connectivity is functioning as a new transportation epoch, information “ is immaterial rather than bonded to paper or plastic sheets, it is thus instantaneously transferable to any place that has a network connection” (Mitchell, 1995: pp.52-3). This simultaneity is an enabler to a new system of organization, where work and knowledge can operate between any spatial point instantaneously, and has given rise to a new paradigm of societal reading and understanding.

As Manuel Castells writes in his book the Rise of the Network Society (2000: p.386), “the global city is not a place but a process,” and it is this understanding of the city that is core to understanding contemporary society: the city is no longer a place, and this reading implies the sense of place becoming separate from its physical relation, and ‘places’ can be located in the virtual world as a crossover ‘node’ on the network. As King (2006: p.45) writes, objects “symbolically related are brought into a network proximity that can mitigate or redeem physical distance,” it is possible for relationships to transcend the spatial, where new relationships are built on the objects other defining characteristics.

As Rem Koolhaas (cited in Castells, 2000: p.421) claims to work to “theorise the need to adapt architecture to the process of delocalisation” it is also comparable to write “there has always been a strong semi-conscious connection between what society (in its diversity) was saying and what architects wanted to say” (Castells, 2000: p.418). This comparison, with Koolhaas arguing towards architectural adjustment to the shift to placeless flows expresses how physical space is merely the projection of society in the manner it was capable of doing. It just remains to be seen whether delocalisation theory manifests itself in a state such that it manages to remain relevant, both to society’s interests, but also to the vision of architects.

As delocalisation sets in, new relationships are emerging, untied from the constraints of physical relationships, we are experiencing a shift towards a global state. Michael Speaks writes in his essay It’s Out There (1996), about a “ubiquitous globalisation discourse” (p.26) which is becoming more prevalent in contemporary society, together with “the increasing use of ecological models

THE SOCIETY OF FLOWS, GLOBALISATION & REGIONALISM 1-3

The concept of city as process begins to express the concept of globalisation, as zones in a city, each keyed to a specific industry, or housing the entire manufacturing line of a product, begin to alter, with cities and zones instead becoming links in the chain, such as an office in North America controlling the manufacturing process in China, which then ships to France for localising and distribution, as opposite to the classic model such as Detroit as a centre of car manufacturing. In a sense, the city has changed tack from a collection of places to a flux, a series of flows.

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to explain the relationship between complex, dynamical systems and their environments” (p.26).

This theory of ecology and regionalism considerations is important to make note of in this discussion due to the importance it is having on some of the new digital avant-garde, particularly the “theatrically anonymous” (Jones, 2010) Dutch ‘acronym’ firms, mostly due to the work of father figure Rem Koolhaas and his work on ‘Bigness,’ or the idea that architecture is fast approaching urbanism in its scale (Speaks, 1996: p.27), such that it must “rethink not only architectural forms but the forms of architectural practice.” (p.27). In particular it is “architecture’s relationship to its exterior, namely to the globalised urban world in which it must, as a practice, struggle to survive” (p.27).

1-3 THE SOCIETY OF FLOWS, GLOBALISATION & REGIONALISM

In the 20th and prior centuries our cities have mostly been understood almost as self-contained entities, with each city and its surrounding villages operating with a kind of centre and periphery effect, supporting each other through spatial proximity. However, as the 20th century drew to a close and society began to explore the 21st, these readings are becoming obsolete: with the rise of delocalisation and a new reading of flows, the urban environment can be understood as existing more as a collection of nodal points, where the digital and informational network ‘touches’ with the physical, in points all over the world.1 What is occurring therefore, is that the city-and-surrounds paradigm is altering to instead present itself as regions, with cities providing speciality to a complete region, instead of the city complete itself, as MVRDV (1999: p.17) write, there is a “continued demand for the specialties of “elsewhere” make every region dependent on a series of others, thus enforcing a symbiotic balance among them”2. By rebranding the city-as-object to region-as-object, each city can present itself as a piece to a greater puzzle. This can be seen in the Randstad megacity region in the Netherlands, consisting of Amsterdam, Utrecht, the Hague and Rotterdam. While not insignificant individually, each provides an aspect of the whole: an airport, services, governance, and a port, respectively. This specialisation also can be created industrially, such as Silicon Valley in California, a region defined by technology-based companies such as Apple, but which could not have existed without globalisation theory and global communications to manufacture and distribute the inventions and products which emerge.

1 As Geoff Manaugh uncovers in his article on Open Source Design, the US has a complex network of global sites through which it is critically dependant upon, whether it be oil production or informational relays, and thus can be considered a modern take on the centre and periphery approach of the 20th century, but with a nodal attitude. Indeed, this spatial attitude can be applied to many similar practices at different scales, for example a modern production chain, from R&D through manufacture and promotion.

2 MVRDV investigate this phenomenon of regions quite intensely throughout a lot of their work, and their research tends to read like a completionist hoarder of data, who collects without thought to its influence before applying themselves to how the data shapes their brief. This approach to their design work is covered more deeply in part 2, with a study of their project, the Regionmaker, among others.

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This data visualisation expresses the United States critical dependancies, i.e. the systems and locales that if they were to be distrupted or removed the US would lose a key piece of infrastructure or supply.

This map is good at articulating the inadequacies of typical spatial mapping in relationships as the relationships operate outside of typical spatial-proximity norms.

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Dymaxion Base Corretta (Manaugh, 2011).

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1-3 THE SOCIETY OF FLOWS, GLOBALISATION & REGIONALISM

As the network society grows alongside the phenomenon of constant communication, we will find our grasp expanding towards a more global level. Due to a change in focus from physical relationships towards social proximity, designers will have to consider this change in their developments of interventions.

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1-4 The Digital’s Effect on Traditional Living & Typologies Prior to the 21st Century, William Mitchell published City of Bits (1995), and within its pages predicted many changes, some that have occurred, some that have yet to happen, and some incorrect predictions. However, it still stands as a key text on the impact that the digital world can effect our physical spaces.

“We are all cyborgs now,” Mitchell writes, on the proliferation of mobile technology, “Architects and urban designers of the urban era must begin by retheorizing the body in space” (p.28). We can no longer perceive our architecture as purely spatial, nor physical, and instead design a virtual presence into our buildings. However, this point seems to have jumped the gun in regards to the true impact of digital. Throughout the book, he tends to find himself arguing in favour of the virtual replacing aspects of the physical, and while some of his predictions are true, many did not pan out: the virtual is not replacing the physical, the true outcome of the new dimension is a tandem approach.

This can be seen in our reactions to the steam and car-based eras throughout history. After the initial period of excitement amongst both users and urban designers, aside from a couple of radical proposals3, soon settled into a system of simultaneous existence with these new transportation

Within City of Bits (1995), Mitchell raises questions relating to the typologies that may find themselves altered by the communication explosion. The most poignant discussion raised is that of the library, as a vast majority of information can be found online and as such the typology is argued as no longer “organising bricks, but software – designing storing, querying, retrieving needs” (p.49). Again, Mitchell’s predictions skirt close, with libraries suffering slightly in the availability online but physical books still maintain a healthy proliferation. However, the tandem theory can be seen in digital sorting and browsing methods, for example in the University of Sheffield’s STAR service. Ironically, the growth of the digital has instead of crippling the traditional library, arguably enabled a growth in scale, towards collections greater than previously viable.

In a similar light, Mitchell discusses that “in a virtual museum digital images of painting, videos of living organisms or three-dimensional simulations of sculptures and works of architecture (perhaps destroyed or un-built ones) stand in for physical objects” (p.59), and this concept is interesting, particularly as he argues “that museums will increasingly be seen as places for going back to the originals” (p.60). Again the simultaneous approach can be seen to be most beneficial, with both realities functioning in parallel, both can tackle the issues best suited, and coexist and interact.

3 Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, and Kenzo Tange’s Plan for Tokyo 1960, for example, both of which were based around car based transport and its impact on the urban form, attempted to majorly change the fabric of both Paris and Tokyo in regard to a mostly automobile based system.

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methods and their older cousins. Where the car and its enabler, the road, existed alongside historical layers of steam train, and rails, and pedestrian areas, we will find that the communication explosion and its enabler, the internet, will live side by side with the previous epoch’s physical manifestations.

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1-4 THE DIGITALS EFFECT ON TRADITIONAL LIVING & TYPOLOGIES

Additionally, the change to a networked society has caused several new typologies to emerge, resonant with the increasing void between function and place - the ‘non-place’ (Augé, 2008). In essence, these spaces “capture the physical consequences of an exclusively commodified social environment” (Harris and Taylor, 2005: p.127), and represent the over-saturation that digital proliferation and global transport interconnectivity have resulted in. It is difficult to identify location within these places, as the optimisation for place-to-place travel and outlets create a structure travelled through but not remembered. Some work has been undertaken to try and mitigate this shift towards place-less buildings, such as UNStudio’s transport interchange in Arnhem, who utilise interweaving and overlapping diagrams to illustrate patterns of movement.4 Writing about UNStudio’s work, Zellner (1999: p.168) argues that by “paying particular attention to issues of circulation and egress, van Berkel and Bos (directors of UNStudio) based the plan on careful examination of traffic flows in and around the station,” an approach that is increasing in prevalence as architects struggle to tackle a new dimension of analysis ability. 5

4 This approach to architecture is finding itself increasingly in the limelight, backed by the strong branding of practices such as BIG, whose work is discussed in part 2.

5 There are multiple practices, often collectively dubbed the acronym practices, who base themselves from Koolhaas’s writings with OMA, and include MVRDV, who have been exploring the progression of typologies, rather than the creation of new ones, to reinvigorate built form in the digital age.

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The form of the transport interchange was determined by UNStudio’s analysis of pedestrian and vehicular movement patterns to determine its form while nodal hotspots of circulation were earmarked for top lighting through carefully placed skylights above.

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Arnhem Transport Intechange Masterplan (Arnhem Central, n.d.)

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1-5 Using Data Visualisations to Analyse Societal Changes.

As well as creating many new constraints and factors of consideration for architects, the digital era has also helped enable designers by a similar amount, through computer analysis and data collection methods, increasing speed and easing communication across professional specialisations.

Data visualisation is finding usage within both architectural analysis fields and in design, and can incorporate many topics of data and information. Van Weelden (2006: p.27) writes “metadata open(s) up new transformative ways of tackling social or ecological problems,” this metadata is the result of analysis and collection of data resulting from the digi-social state, and its mapping onto traditional problems. The challenge of mapping this branch of data is that it cannot be traditionally mapped spatially, it is “not about fixed positions, but rather a matter of visualising tensions of various kinds” (Bouman, 2006: p.55).

1-5 USING DATA VISUALISATIONS TO ANALYSE SOCIETAL CHANGE

The difficulty of this form of visualisation is to find a way to map the resulting information in a manner that is both informative, accessible and uncompromising. An example of this is the work of Meg Studer, a designer/cartographer, who has mapped the influence and movement of the Global Salt Trade through a series of visualisations. The work she presents here maps a very high amount of data, but by representing it through its physical interactions, its nodal touchstones, as it were, it becomes accessible and readable.

Comparatively, Asymptote Architecture, identify themselves as undertaking “an evolving discipline that results from the convergence of data-mapping and simulation, digital form making, information “architecture” and virtual reality constructs and theory” (Rashid and Couture, 2002: p.51). Their work primarily consists of information visualisation, from collating spatial data; however, their work for Richard Saul Wurman’s Understanding USA visualisation (see page 17). suffers from aesthetic overpowerment, and its data is hard to understand without a reference point.

Similarly, architects approach data visualisation and manipulation in a closely related manner. By collating data from various resources, both physical and virtual conditions, and mapping this data, constraints can be found and manipulated. In a lengthy method statement, the EPFL lab (2012), outline a useful approach to tackling computational visualisation: “Conventional master plans which propose either a single static ‘end’ condition, or several landmark phases en route to a fixed solution are incapable of responding to changes in the factors which regulate development over time. Frozen in an outmoded context, such strategies deliver ineffective planning in the short-term and require extensive recapitulation in the long-term.

By examining existing environmental forces computationally and employing bottomup design strategies, the studio proposals will achieve performative characteristics that are independent of the global system’s scale and extents. Using this performance as feedback and employing mechanisms for adaptive growth, the studio will generate dynamic and robust systems informed by mutable circumstances and yet continue to be effective.”

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These visualisations articulate the globalisation nature of trade in the modern world, through exploration of salt imports and distribution.

This data could not easily be marked on a smaller scale promixity based map due to the complex nature of imports and supply chains.

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Meg Studer’s study of the Global Salt Trade (Ne Distribution , n.d. and Ne Imports, n.d.)

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By approaching architectural design from a data collation viewpoint, it is possible to adjust from a historical viewpoint of snapshot design, to a fluid system where it is possible to adjust outcomes and inputs realtime through the use of software. The Dutch firm MVRDV have also defined their own manner of visualisation, deemed datascapes (Betsky, et al., 2006; MVRDV, 1999; 2005), that are essentially data assigned space- landscapes of data. This overlap of immaterial and real space, or through extension virtual- and real- allow MVRDV, and other practices, to analyse areas for an optimised outcome.

1-5 USING DATA VISUALISATIONS TO ANALYSE SOCIETAL CHANGE

While designers and other data visualisers remain relatively free in their manner of representation, architecture, being primarily the creation of physical form, has created their own manner of representation, mapping social and physical data constraints onto the physical landscape to both inform and optimise their work. The danger with this manner of representation is whether to maintain the flux state of the data, viewing the city not as “inert data waiting to be dug up and analysed like archaeological ruins, they are living organisms of complex cellular and molecular composition” (Enwezor, 2003, p.116), or to maintain an architectural tradition of crystalising moments in time in their buildings, a solid monument to a period of data, as can be seen in some examples of Peter Eisenman’s work.6 As a criticism of the entire architectural tactic of data analysis, the very scale and allencompassing nature of the network serves as a detractor of the same cause. How can a practice produce effective and optimised work without full consideration of the sphere within which they work?

There is a debate about the level of ethics within this data collection, however, for example Van Weelden (2006: p.26) cautions “don’t ask questions about the political, social and moral issues raised by the new and powerful interplay between digital space and the physical world” to create a valid, unimpeded result. However, objections have been raised ranging from the mild privacy concious citizen to some Christian groups calling RFID chips the ‘mark of the beast’ (Gere, 2008).

Additional concerns have been raised in regard to tracking individuals consistently, potentially leading to a wider usage of location based sensors as opposed to personal-temporal tracking.

As part of my own work, a study was undertaken to create a visualisation of the data that makes and defines Edinburgh’s Old Town Region (see page 19). By collating all the available data on the region, such as imports and exports, population figures, and political standing, the data was arranged into a series of cards, or ‘nodes’ for the networked diagram. From this origin, the cards can be arranged to form a network of cause and effect, and by introducing scenarios, the cards can be followed to produce essentially an analogue design tool for a parametric design process, and was heavily inspired by MVRDV and BIG. The tool essentially functions as a proto-authorless data analysis tool, where the data is presented with no bias or discrimination.

6 see, for example, Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia, set to be completed 2012, as a physical crystalizing of the meta-datascape on the physical environment.

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These visualisations have been criticised for their complexity and difficulty in making out the data communicated within. This “imformation overload” lends the images a chaotic nature, and highlights the importance of selective data usage and consideration of the whole.

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Asymptote Architecture’s visualisations for Saul Wurman’s Undertanding USA (Understanding USA 1, n.d.; Understanding USA 2, n.d.; Understanding USA 3, n.d.)

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1-5 USING DATA VISUALISATIONS TO ANALYSE SOCIETAL CHANGE

Understanding various data visualisation techniques and globalisation discourse is an important ground study for the reading of the work of the digital avant-garde as one of the strongest unifying factors for this approach is the near ubiquitous concern for data and how to approach the digital.

These architects tackle a route that is specifically an architecture “open to external influences” not “a lifeless object on and in which those influences are registered as avant-gardism gestures” (Speaks, 1996: p.26). Even through history “movement in architecture has involved the arrest of dynamic forces as static forms through mapping” states Cynthia Davidson, in Anywise (cited in Speaks, 1996: p.28).

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This photograph shows the interactive parametric model developed to investiage data visualisation at a physical, hands-on level.

The tactility of the model enabled all students to get involved and explore the possibilities and speculative potential of parametric data analysis.

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Edinburgh Old Town Model (Farr, 2011)

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1-6 Defining Approaches of Digital Architectures.

Throughout the discussion thus far there has been talk of two major paradigms in the digital epoch: the shift towards a virtual society, one based not upon physical proximity, but on needs and interests; and a concept of the digital medium as enabler, allowing designers to produce output using new animate and complex tools. Likewise, the impact upon the architectural avant-garde can be divided roughly into two focal routes, though the definition of each is arguable: Virtual Building versus Virtual Architecture, and InFormation versus DeFormation. Both arguments raise various subtleties in where they choose to split the groups, and thus should be considered as two layers to the whole picture.

1-6 DEFINING APPROACHES TO DIGITAL ARCHITECTURES

The architectural group Asymptote introduce a definition of the terms virtual architecture and virtual building in their book Flux (Rashid and Couture, 2002). Virtual architecture, they argue, revolves around “the assumption… that spatial, informational, and temporal circumstances provoke experiences and create assemblies that are tangible and plastic” (p.51). Comparatively, virtual building, which they liken to renderings of conceptual buildings: renderings they later criticise as being a close ended view on digital technology, is characterised by “choosing instead to view technology as only a means to the further entrenchment of architectural representation as “perfect illusion” (p.52). Essentially by creating a model of the desired building using advanced software, the product emerges as a building of the model.

The loose conglomeration of architects, OCEAN, approach their installations through an analysis of immaterial circumstance as explored by virtual architecture: they describe their technique as “rather than resorting to the usual piecemeal systems of urban assemblage and bricolage, OCEAN mines the potential of a volatile and pliant urbanism and architecture for solutions” (OCEAN, 1999: p.160). While “the collaborative asserts that recent advances in digital space-modelling scripting software will shift urban organi-zational [sic] principles from figure and field towards a vectorial logic of magnitude, trajectory and intensity” (p.153) give an indication of the future capabilities of digital software on data manipulation. The usage of software in this manner, together with virtual architecture in general, lends itself to a reading that virtual architecture is utilising digital means to map the virtual, immaterial dimension and apply the knowledge gained to create architecture: a two stage process.

However, many architects, such as Greg Lynn utilise digital software in a more physically representative manner, choosing rather to map and represent the physical dimension using digital methods. This method, whose outspoken advocates such as Lynn and Schumacher function as figureheads for the promotion of this virtual building, is lending itself to the creation of new forms and physical creations that would not have been possible before NURBs manipulation and parametric softwares.

A similarly placed complementary definition is explored in Jeffrey Kipnis’s article Towards a New Architecture (2004), is that of DeFormation and InFormation approaches. DeFormatist architecture, Kipnis writes, is the “role of new aesthetic form” in architecture and focusing on the

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the conglomeration OCEAN utilises data collection and manipulation tools to create new forms and experiences only possible through the physical representation of vectorial data.

This type of installation is a good representative of the possibilities of virtual architecture: of mapping virtual information onto a physical representation or response.

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OCEAN’s Chamberworks Installation (Chamberworks Installation, n.d.)

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“visual in the engenderment of new spaces” (p.59).

Comparatively, InFormational architecture “de-emphasises the role of aesthetic form in favour of new institutional form” (p.59), and also focuses on the orthogonal language of modernism.

This reading of the digital avant-garde provides a new twist on the traditional form and function divide. It can be seen that DeFormational architecture is the progressive arm of Form-focused design, concerning itself with “no architectural form other than the function” and with “no informing choreography nor any use of technology” (p.60). On the other hand, InFormational architecture is the progressive strand of Function-focused design, concerned with analysing data and social patterns to progress our typologies into the digital epoch.

By reading both definitions together, each on an axis, a scale can be created, positioning the proponents of the digital avant-garde according to their focus. These axes justify both the input (virtual architecture and building: or, social and cultural data and physical data respectively) against output (DeFormation and InFormation), and can function as an effective way of analysing the work these designers produce.

1-6 DEFINING APPROACHES TO DIGITAL ARCHITECTURES

However, a gap exists between information and form, as the divide is both large and hazy. As Greg Lynn writes in his essay Forms of Expression (1998), architect Ben Van Berkel (UNStudio), among others, utilise “invisible parameters,” to “negotiate the gap between ideas and form” in a “non-linear and non-deterministic” (p.224) way. This negotiation can be roughly summated into how the designer approaches the task (the task input) and the involvement of the designer in the bridging of the input/output divide.

To define approaches to this task, Patrik Schumacher, partner at Zaha Hadid Architects, writes in his essay, Parametric Diagrams (2010), about these further distinctions, ordinary versus extraordinary diagrams. These distinctions are best articulated through his own words: “since the mid-nineties parametric diagrammes started to emerge, first in the form of animations. These were extra-ordinary parametric diagrammes within open-ended design research explorations. Today most of us have switched to work with ordinary parametric diagrammes, i.e. we know in advance what we are aiming for.”

In his own words, ordinary diagrams are those through which the outcome is one that is aimed for, as can quite often be the case for brief-driven projects. Alternatively, extra-ordinary diagrams are more exploratory, rendering the data collated and represented objective. A further level of description is hinted at in the above quote additionally: parametric and metric distinctiveness, whereupon parametric data is interweaved and affects the other data within a system, whereas metric data, associated with abstract art and deconstructivism in Schumacher’s writings, are independent and can operate on their own information.

This distinction of ordinary and extra-ordinary is an important one, where the Virtual axis functions as Input, and the Formational axis is input, the factor of ‘Ordinariness’ functions as a third

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definition, a control factor, which serves to articulate the author’s involvement within the transition between input and output. By inserting this control factor between the axes of Input and Output, it is possible to articulate the involvement of the designer in the transition of information to form.

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1-7 Other defining systems: Jones’s Big Forking Dilemma.

Other systems have tried to define and regulate this group of digital avant-garde in the past, for example Wes Jones’s post-critical system explored in his article Big Forking Dilemma (2010). In the article, he writes about categorizing these architects in a form of tree diagram, dividing the work into Authorless, Post-critical (the Acronym practices following the writings of Koolhaas, such as OMA, MVRDV, and BIG), and Variable architecture (practised by the previously mentioned Lynn and Eisenman). He writes that the Dutch firms favour the “pragmatism of statistics and quantifiable cultural research,” arguing that the firms are responding to architectural problems with a type of nihilism, and reducing architectural wilfulness to the sidelines and being replaced with “something objective, external, quantifiable.”

1-7 OTHER DEFINING SYSTEMS jones’s big forking dilemma

The other fork, the variable angle, Jones analyses as the study to a “near figure, or “undecidable” or “unstable object,” with particular reference to Eisenman. More recently, with the progression of digital techniques, Eisenman’s diagrams have become appropriated by protégés such as Greg Lynn, who have worked within “the blob” and other influences, such as biomimicry. Uniformly, each proponent of this type of architecture pushes the “uniqueness” of their outcome, one that, practically, only matters as an “outcome of its indexical relationship to the flow, forces, or other influences engaged by the script.” Versioning as a form of architecture is described by Jones as a “blunt, inelegantly literal production of a chorus of alternatives” that “leads to work that is flat and lifeless.”

What can be taken from this argument is the clear definition of a few key forks within the overall tree diagram format, such as wilful and authorless design, as well as the core form and functional definitions. The Forking system which Jones uses is a discreet method of analysis: the architects analysed fit into specific places on the diagram, such that it is difficult to compare their work.

These definitions can also be applied in a scalar format as proposed by the Input/Output system.

However, the differences between the I/O system and the Forking system are the focus of the analysed area. Jones places all of his argument on the basis that these architects are responding to the digital enablement technology in various ways: whether variability or pragmatic nihilism.

He focuses this divide on the physical realization of the projects in question, such that the forks depend on the architects’ catalogue of projects. In its presentation, the discreet nature of the tree diagram bears resemblance to the genealogy family trees, children paying homage to their defining fathers, both brothers of a combined heritage.

The proposed I/O system presents an alternative approach to the grouping and presentation of the digital avant-garde. Instead of tackling issues of realization exclusively, the system approaches from the instigation of the project, focusing instead on the progression of the project from data collection through to focus in design development. This shift serves to aid analysis of architectural projects in terms of how the architects choose to analyse and respond to the architectural divide in realities (physical and virtual), and through visualization techniques, how the architect then applies the data, be it in form, or function. How the architect tackles the creation and development of form and function is less considered than how they got there: the means justifies the end, as it were.

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the diagram articulates well the complexity of the digital avant garde’s geneaology in an easy to understand manner, yet neglects certain elements of comparision, largely stemming from these architects’ usage of data and application of this information, something aimed to correct in the I/O system.

jones’s big forking dilemma OTHER DEFINING SYSTEMS 1-7

Patt’s visualisation of Jones’s Big Forking Dilemma, the so-called Big Forking Diagram (Patt, 2010).

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1-8 Conclusion, or, the Digital as Instigator.

The argument raised throughout this section has shown that the new wave of digital avant-garde architects are not merely utilizing the digital medium as a tool for realizing projects in a form/ functional manner as previously laid out by Jones’s Forking system. Instead, these architects have arguably also approached their designs from a consideration of the digital medium as an enabler of projects: the division of society into layers of physical data and virtual data is not to be underestimated. Therefore, it can be shown that these digital avant-garde have considerations of both digital as Input and as Output within their work. The proposed system, through presenting this

1-8 CONCLUSION, or, the digital as instigator

as I/O and control factors tackles this issue through the veil of data visualization and analysis.

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Part II The Digital Avant Garde

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2-1 Introduction, or, Studies into the Digital Avant Garde By applying the proposed I/O system to the work of a selection of digital avant-garde architects, it can be shown that the work they undertake can be read on a scalar system of a more nuanced nature, as opposed to the discreet forking system of Jones.

For ease of clarification, some terms are useful for carrying over to define general groups of architects as laid out by Jones in his forking system: architecture that is created with either leaning in both I (input) and O (output) categories, but within the control factor, the onus is on the data to speak for itself: the architect does not influence the selection of data or choice of layers.

Cleverness:

a form of architectural design directly inspired by OMA and Koolhaas’s design strategy, Jones (2010) writes “by creating its message in a clever, sometimes ironic, response to the problem, cleverness places itself as an end in itself, with “architecture becom(ing) the means to achieving it.” Clarifying he writes, “cleverness requires a host, but… it does not seek to improve the host.” In short, Cleverness is a term defined by the usage of data to resolve a problem, such that the data analysis is the architectural movement, not the formal realised building.

Variable:

an “aggressively open-ended form-finding process” (Jones, 2010), variable architecture is the search for the “near figure or “undecidable”, keeping the process the key: and focusing “on the method rather than the product.” This architecture is heavily weighted to the formal end of output and the building can be considered almost as a partial snapshot of the constant animatory flux ‘product.’

Wilful design:

the opposite of Authorless, Wilful architecture remains unconcerned with I/O categories, however the control factor is in favour of the designer choosing the desired outcomes, whether by reducing variables or through defining key layers of analysis.

Each case study focuses in particular on a different architect, roughly synonymous with Jones’s Forking system’s four main branches: Wilful Formal (Eisenman); Authorless Formal (Greg Lynn); Authorless Functional (MVRDV); and Wilful Functional (BIG). This is intended to take as wide a grouping as possible in Jones’s genealogy and apply the I/O system to these architects to judge its successes and failures.

or, studies into the digital avant-garde INTRODUCTION 2-1

Authorless design:

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2-2 Peter Eisenman; City of Culture of Galicia Peter Eisenman is often considered one of the major proponents of proto-digital advanced form finding, having been practising architecture for 40 years. Throughout his education and practising career, he has striven to articulate architecture as a discrete discipline, writing in detail about the autonomy and interiority of architecture as a discipline (Eisenman, 1987; 1999), including the creation of a unique language capable of discourse in architectural terms as a stand-alone item, such as in his PhD thesis submission The Formal Basis of Architecture (1963).

Eisenman’s theory revolves around an “interiority” (Lynn, 2004: p.30), such that “architecture should never, as modernism did, place itself in the service of any exterior discourse, such as politics, or philosophy, but should instead articulate itself as an autonomous practice of form following form” (p.30). This theoretical approach positions Eisenman’s architecture as striving to be as uninfluenced by other disciplines as possible - thus often his designs resort or respond to physical data collection due to his disregard of the data of other disciplines.

2-2 PETER EISENMAN: city of culture of galicia

In the design of his second realised project, House VI, the complete isolation from the ground and the ‘natural’ order of things was a deliberate move on Eisenman’s part, as in his essay, Misreading (1987: p.169), he states “the design process of this house, as with all architectural work in this book intended to move the act of architecture from its complacent relationship with the metaphysic of architecture by reactivating its capacity to dislocate, thereby extending the search into the possibilities of occupiable form.”

This early work can be seen to progress architectural form finding through the analysis, and subsequent rejection of physical relationships, both site characteristics and physical user interaction. Thusly, House VI and his theory can be located along the physical input and DeFormational output scale. Through his conscious discard of creating his work in physical harmony with the physical relations he investigated, the transition between input and output can be seen as Wilful. Indeed for an architect interested in pursuing the built representation of his own interiority theories, Eisenman’s work represents a theoretical wilful experimentation.

Through his development, his projects remain primarily interested in geometry and advanced form finding techniques. For example, two projects by Peter Eisenman (the Rebstock Park Masterplan, and Alfreka Office Building) are discussed not as an object but as an event at the scale of urbanism – “it is ‘eventalised,’ opened up, un-folding. It is becoming” (Lynn, 2004: p.44).

Yet it is still concerned with the becoming of form. Further, his project at the Center for the Arts in Atlanta is based around the analysis of the “historical quadrangle configuration,” it is a grid system “deformed by the topography of the ravine when extended to the Center’s site” (p.47). This usage of diagrams to define advanced geometries of form defines this form of architecture.

This development of his theory of interiority and self-articulating work is evident in his largest

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An aerial photography of Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia (Malagamba, n.d.), visible is the manipulation of the GIS data grid that informed the site and inspired the form.

city of culture of galicia :PETER EISENMAN 2-2

Sections through Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia (The City of Culture Sections 1, n.d.)

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project to date, the City of Culture of Galicia, due to be completed in 2012. Known for its artistic vitality and ability to update itself, Galicia’s rich cultural heritage desired a building that would encourage knowledge and contemporary creativity within the backdrop of a city known for its religious pilgrimage.

An international competition that attracted 10 well known architects, also included Rem Koolhaas, and Daniel Libiskind, among others. Eisenman’s project was chosen by an international jury “for its singularity both in terms of the concept and of the art, as well as its exceptional match to the site,” writes the Foundation for the City of Culture of Galicia, the competition hosts (Dezeen, 2010).

In discussing his ideas for the project, he articulates a desire to emulate the Bilbao effect, or Architourism, as iconic buildings creating a new touristic destination, in an interview filmed on site at the City of Culture (estherparedes1, 2009).

The project design is discussed in an article on website ArchDaily (Jett, 2011), through which the main design factors behind the project are discussed: “Its design evolves from the superposition of three sets of information. First, the street plan of the medieval center of Santiago is overlaid on a topographic map of the hillside site, which overlooks the city. Second, a modern Cartesian grid is laid over these medieval routes. Third, through computer modeling software, the topography of the hillside is allowed to distort the two flat geometries, thus generating a topological surface that repositions old and new in a simultaneous matrix never before seen.

2-2 PETER EISENMAN: city of culture of galicia

The original center of Santiago conforms to a figure/ground urbanism in which buildings are figural, or solid, and the streets are residual, or void spaces. Through this mapping operation, the project emerges as a curving surface that is neither figure nor ground but both a figured ground and a figured figure that supersede the figure-ground urbanism of the old city. Santiago’s medieval past appears not as a form of representational nostalgia but as a new yet somehow familiar presence found in a new form.”

This project can thus be read as a continuation of the work he previously explored through his writings and built projects and it operates in a similar position on the scalar system: concerning itself with physical input data and deformational output through a wilful translation. However, in an alteration in focus from the earliest built projects, the City of Culture does not seem to actively ignore its context, but begin to visualise connections and grids that are visible in the virtual representation of physical data, through systems such as GIS.

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city of culture of galicia :PETER EISENMAN 2-2

Plans of Eisenman’s City of Culture of Galicia (The City of Culture Plans, n.d.). Visible in many of these is the Cartesian grid overlay that informed the built forms and finished product.

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2-3 Greg Lynn; Cardiff Bay Opera House In more recent times, students of Eisenman’s thinking have emerged, more in touch with digital developments and trends. Greg Lynn, who has written a large amount about the creation of advanced form, is one of the more outspoken (Lynn, 2004) writing, that he desires “new forms which answer to new, exterior conditions” (p.30), accepting “(Eisenman’s) interiority and tak(ing) form generation as far as it will go” (p.30). By following the theories of his mentor, “(he) calls in question architecture’s humanist interiority – architecture, that is, as a practice of housing and making safe” (p.30). However, where Eisenman’s theory for interiority is concerned with the analysis and rejection of stereotypical assumptions of architecture’s role- a wilful rejection, Lynn’s discussion of pushing advanced form generation finds itself more autonomous in its creations, he is interested in the development of form through digital means as opposed to Eisenman’s use of form to challenge preconceptions.

2-3 GREG LYNN: cardiff bay opera house

In his project entry for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, Assemblage magazine writes “what is not different or new about this project is its formal strangeness: that is, the fact that it looks so new” (Speaks, 1996: p.27); essentially Lynn is not creating a new avenue, but pushing the boundaries of form finding through progressive techniques. Further, it is noted that this could be due to the fact that Lynn’s only response to “address the complexity of contemporary urban life is through form” (p.27). Again and again it is mentioned that “Lynn is more powerfully drawn back into contemporary American architecture’s most powerful interiority: form” (p.28), and it is here that he explores his “search for the new” (p.28). This intense drive for form generation at the expense of all other concerns is the core theory behind his work.

In this understanding, it is possible to locate Lynn on the proposed scalar system. Through advanced form finding, Lynn takes all his data and constraints from physical characteristics: complexity, programmatic legibility, and environmental factors all serve to locate his work on the Physical Input side of the scale, much similar to his mentor Eisenman. Likewise his focus on form finding gives his work an intensely DeFormational slant, though his personal manner of letting the data create his amorphous shapes through variability gives him an authorless slant to the translation between input and output.

The variability aspect of his work is unique to the authorless aspect, as it lets the design ‘design itself’ through constant iterations to find the optimum: Lynn argues that his designs respond to the fact that the “fluid and complex conditions of late 20th-century urban life [are] calling for architectural forms that are themselves more fluid and complex” (Speaks, 1996: p.28). Like his work in general though, this concept of constant shifting, and animate architecture draws criticism in its realisation. In a discussion between Lynn and critic Kipnis, Kipnis shows the difficulty in translating a flexible and animate design process to reality:

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Aerial shot of Lynn’s visualisation for the Cardiff Bay Opera House (Cardiff aerz, n.d.)

Both of these images of Lynn’s proposal showcase his distinctive Blob architecture that is created through manipulation of advanced form finding techniques capable through NURBS modelling software.

cardiff bay opera house :GREG LYNN 2-3

View of Lynn’s proposal for the Cardiff Bay Opera House (Cardiff Oval View, n.d.)

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Lynn “…well, are you saying architecture has to move in order for this to

be an interesting design approach? I would say no.”

Kipnis

the motion away.” (cited in Speaks, 1996: p.29)

“You say no, but you do not show us what happens when you take

2-3 GREG LYNN: cardiff bay opera house

This exchange brings to mind the notion of virtual architecture and building, and of creating a form that is representational rather than functional at a dynamic level. Lynn’s work, for example here, often falls within the digital representation of forces rather than the analytical integration of those same trends. However, there is a notion here of “does this mean that architecture is no more than a static form that arrests those forces?” (p.29), to which Lynn argues to reverse, architecture as non-static form. “But when it becomes form, the audience asks, when it becomes architecture, does it remain dynamic?” (p.29). Lynn cannot respond to these allegations, as his work represents design animate, but architecture static- “architect is only the object-form at the end of the process” (p.29). But “why does his architecture stop moving when it is no longer design technique and becomes architecture” (p.29). It is questionable as whether this could be construed as failure, that in exploring a virtual form finding building, Lynn has neglected the end product, the physical architecture, or whether it represents experimentation of a new kind, the building as by-product: a possible snap shot.

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2-4 MVRDV; The Regionmaker The previously discussed architects are utilising data visualisation software to critically examine physical relationships to create advanced formal buildings and structures, however on the other side of the divide, students and followers of OMA founder Rem Koolhaas are experimenting with data as functional instigator. Koolhaas (cited in Lynn, 2004) writes the notion of “forms that look like they are fluid with their urban contexts may in fact interdict, and forms which ‘look like’ they are interdictive may in fact be fluid with their urban contexts” (p.30). This signifies a change from “what is the essence of architecture?” towards “what can architecture do when it looks to the exterior, to the globalised metropolis.” (p.30).

It is in this context that the discussion and critical analysis of the digital avant-garde turns to the Dutch school of thought, and MVRDV, who are representative of the school by relying on computational techniques, and favouring the “pragmatism of statistics and quantifiable cultural research,” (Jones, 2010).

This pragmatism and reliance marks cleverness, if it is indeed an independent movement, as crucially self defeating, it is “too busy weaving around the field, feinting and dodging, to care about forward or behind.” (Jones, 2010) By taking Koolhaas’s studies as an example, one can take his analysis of infrastructure within Lagos, State-run Media in Dubai, and his own book Delirious New York, to see how cleverness takes analysis from each programme in turn, and is characterised by its position to its own product, rather than to the movement as a whole.

This argument of cleverness can be applied to MVRDV’s work, which can be defined as overtly computational, and managing to “forge a signature for their work through a continued project without resorting to personal expression or seeming to violate cleverness’s aloofness,” (Jones, 2010) through objective number analysis. As such, “the working method of MVRDV is to conduct extensive research, assemble massive quantities of data, and then set out, rationally and objectively, to resolve the problem” (Allen, 2003: p.83).

optimise and create a city of maximum density to minimum space. Their working methods can be surmised in their writings: “if we spread the required volume more or less equally over sector living it would lead to a tapestry of plots measuring 20×10 metres with streets of 10 and 5 metres wide, and an average height of 28 metres or 10 stories.” (p.82)

the regionmaker :MVRDV 2-4

MVRDV as a practice frequently tackle issues of density as a design catalyst via this objective anaylsis, which can be seen in their work, particularly Metacity/Datatown (MVRDV, 1999) and the Functionmixer program. In all these works, the route to product is the point, with the product “no more or less than the final state of the process that led to it” (Jones, 2010). This theoretical driving force is evident in some of their more research-focused projects, such as the optimised city discussed in Metacity/Datatown, where the city was split into ‘zones’ (such as living and CO2), to

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It is in this context of objective analysis and issues of density that MVRDV situate most of their work. Most representative of many of their ideals and working methods is their architectural design tool, the Regionmaker (2002), which tackles issues of regions and regional identity, as previously discussed, but also presents a transparency of design method that is rare among high profile architects.

The Regionmaker as program takes its cues from the statistical rationalising of previous projects, taking “on the job of giving shape to those zeroes and ones” (Betsky, 1999: p.11) to create “an appropriate architecture for the information age” (p.13). To achieve this, it functions as a conglomeration of multiple tools: the Inframaker – for movement, traffic optimisation, and other prediction programs; the Housing Generator – for optimal housing and neighbourhood creation; the Light-Calculator – for optimising the need for natural light; and the Functionmixer – to create the best mix of functions. Finally, a piece of software called the Idealizer allows “ideologies to be parametrised” (MVRDV, 2003: p.103). As a whole, this program allows for the “development of ‘devices.’ Tools that can combine large scale issues with individualised input, that can combine analysis with proposals.” (MVRDV, 2003: p.107).

Interestingly, after the data collection, the region is finally defined through two images. First is the physical/spatial region: one defined by climate, physical geography, infrastructure, and other tangible elements – a ‘hardware’ vision. Second is the societal system, of flows and processes, and incorporates non-physical dimensions: the behaviour/psychology of societies, activities of trade and economic performance – a ‘software’ view of the region. Both of these visions are joined by comparisons of “scale, connectivity, hierarchies and time” (p.113). Through the collection of data and computer visualisation, a parametric model of interrelationships can map these interactions simultaneously, breaking the traditional barrier between the walls of hardware and software, typically used together but affecting only their own sphere. This blurring is reflected in

2-4 MVRDV: the regionmaker

the practice’s statements that “parameters can be seen as spatial laws or social laws” (p.123).

Given the program’s usage of data to speak for itself throughout, some element of control is needed, but indirectly and at an information extraction stage. This can be seen in the examples given of the tool as a visualiser “to explore the possibilities of the region” by setting out “four extreme scenarios… they may serve as a platform for discussion, comparing different possible futures” (p.279). These examples range from picturing the region in a scenario of mass unemployment to being a widespread campus of learning. Through the parametric nature of the project, the results can then be extracted from a simple initial input command.

However, in undertaking their work in this manner, “the aesthetical aspect of their architecture

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(Winy_03_BIG, n.d.)

(Winy_08_BIG, n.d.)

These images, from MVRDV’s program the Regionmaker, show the abstract nature of their analysis program and, in the bottom image, the possibility to compare various parametric outcomes such that data analysis and extrapolation can inform the architectures subsequently explored.

the regionmaker :MVRDV 2-4

(Winy_09_BIG, n.d.)

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is usually the most neglected.” (Lootsma, 2003: p.35). As such the working method of MVRDV has been debated (Guiheux, 2003; Lootsma, 2003) as being “without language” or being the connecting link between language, and critics are divided about the validity of these datascapesas-design projects.

2-4 MVRDV: the regionmaker

Through these discussions, MVRDV’s work can be seen to be placed along the InFormational axis, as their data tends towards issues of programme and usage of space rather than the formal reading. However, though their work often takes data from the social and cultural aspect of the Input axis, this project (the Regionmaker) takes some of its data from physical data additionally, such as Bioregions and Physical boundaries, thus locating this project, at least partially, someway onto the Physical data input additionally. Their transition from Input to Output is as authorless as they can make it, with the data defining and influencing other data and context until the project emerges. The Regionmaker’s method of defining scenarios to determine outcomes is much more speculative, allowing the data to express outcome, as opposed to the author shaping and directing the data directly to achieve a specific outcome.

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2-5 BIG; 8 House In a similar vein to MVRDV, the Bjarke Ingels Group emerged from the Dutch/OMA school of thought, with their work revolving around defining the programme of the buildings they create.

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’s work, like his former employer, Rem Koolhaas at OMA, has a strong graphical image and branding throughout, which he writes is to locate architecture within the contemporary society. In addition to presenting his work in a contemporary manner, his manner of work is also driven by computer technology and digital society issues. Issues of density and environmental concerns are common themes throughout his work (BIG, 2010), and his consistent use of overlaid data and diagrams would be difficult to extract from the digital environment. He has also embraced video and internet technology to display and articulate his work, as can be seen in his explanatory film for his project 8 House (Actuarchitecture, 2011).

Through this video and entries in the firm’s monograph, the design method behind the 8 House project can be extracted through a transparent design method, and an easily communicable system of diagrams.

By beginning with the basic units of the project (a tower and a housing block), the firm then applies a series of programmatic constraints determined through data (BIG, 2010: p.91), as well as a series of environmental optimisations, primarily through twisting and distorting the preconceived blocks. This can be seen in the height alterations present to maximise southern light through to the courtyards, as well as the positioning of housing above to maximise daylight and offices below to maximise street space. After this series of applications of various constraints and optimisations, a building emerges, one that exists almost because it is the only option left to it.

This conceptual approach is one that defines a large portion of the practice’s work, though in some other projects, such as the Danish Maritime Museum, historical and cultural data play a more important role in the reduction of constraints to form the building. As such, it can be seen that the practice’s work takes input from both physical and cultural realms of data to create a broad picture of constraints. In terms of output, the practice is hard to define, operating each project fairly independently, however through their work, the programmes they apply to built form are less what emerges from the application of data, but are instead an aspect of the data they apply. In practice their work takes on a inFormational output, with the built form directly influenced by the programatic data applied to the site, and usually incorporating unique mixtures of programmes defined through social data analysis.

8 house :BIG 2-5

Arguably the work presented by this practice presents a new definition: where traditionally architects such as Eisenman and Lynn work to define a new advanced form finding architecture, BIG are working to define a new branded form of architecture, one that is still receptive and optimised for social need. Their translation from input to output, therefore, is strongly wilful, as the layers the practices apply to the project are keyed to specific needs(and a specific branded image): such as daylight availability to programme, or the twisting of a tower for historical axisrelations. The wilful operation they employ is similarly different from Eisenman’s articulation

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2-5 BIG: 8 house

of diagrams to create a theoretical composition, but instead an application of data they deem applicable to the project to apply a large amount of constraints to the site such that the building is revealed.

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Aerial Shot of BIG’s 8 House (Luftfoto, n.d.)

(8 House Diagram 07, n.d.)

(8 House Diagram 08, n.d.)

(8 House Diagram 11, n.d.)

In a concise and graphically strong manner, BIG apply various factors to the design of a starting block such that the resulting form feels inevitable and unavoidable but is largely a one-time result of a specific system and order of application of chosen constraints as opposed to the free form mass-application of practices like MVRDV.

8 house :BIG 2-5

These diagrams (left) articulate BIG’s design method, one that is undertaken on a large proportion of their projects.

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2-6 Conclusion Jones’s Forking Diagram, the initial method of defining these architectures can be seen as a genealogy of sorts, that is the mentors and heritage of modern routes. The newly proposed I/O system, on the other hand, considers these architects as operating simultaneously, but along interweaving pathways. This angle, derived from data visualisations as a response to the networked and non-spatial relationships developing through the digital era of communication, provides a more progressive view of the work of this increasingly populated part of architectural design.

A number of problems arose, however, when studying and positioning these architects: in particular the nuances of each route. The issue of autonomy and wilful was difficult, as beyond these definitions is the reasoning behind each choice: for example the theoretical leanings of Eisenman versus the predetermined methods of BIG, that sometimes can read almost as postrationalising, versus the autonomy of the experimentation of MVRDV and Lynn. Likewise when considered the Input end of the scale, the results were within a fairly narrow band; this could be due to the deFormational architects rejecting social data for physical, whether on a theoretical or experimental basis, while the autonomy of MVRDV called for a mass collection of large masses of data, uncaring of the subject. However, the I/O system was designed to be an overview of the architects’ work, so when viewed as an overarching comparative tool this simplicity can be seen as capable, if not beneficent.

As such, despite achieving a goal of redefining the digital avant-garde in a scalar system to display the interweaved influences and outputs of these architects, the sheer variation between projects that defines the work of these architects is still constraining and the drawback of this system, such that it could never replace text and images as the most complete definition.

At its most successful, the scalar system works effectively at defining the architects by their influence and input on the transition, from collection and visualisation of the data to their application of it: as a visualisation of the working process of these architects. As Jones (2010) writes, cleverness is a design movement that is recognizable by the design method rather than the built form at the end.

2-6 CONCLUSION

Therefore, in the eyes of the digital avant-garde, the means justify the end.

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The Scalar System of Defintion INPUT

Peter Eisenman Greg Lynn Bjarke Ingels Group, BIG

physical

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illf

ul

KEY

MVRDV

or th au

N

O

TI

SI

AN

virtual

TR

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ss

inFormational

deFormational

OUTPUT

This final visual outcome is the visualisation of the case studies undertaken through part II of this study and represents the influences and outcomes of various digital avant garder architects and their relationship to one anothers working methods, something previously unexplored in systems such as Jones’s geneaology tree.

CONCLUSION 2-6

The Scalar System of Definition (Farr, 2011)

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Part III Bibliography

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3-1 Reference List Allen, S., 2003. Artificial Ecology. In: Betsky, A. et al. Ed., 2003. Reading MVRDV. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Betsky, A., 2003. MVRDV: The Matrix Project. In: Betsky, A. et al. Ed., 2003. Reading MVRDV. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Betsky, A. et al. Ed., 2003. Reading MVRDV. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

BIG, 2010. Yes is More, an archicomic on architectural evolution. Los Angeles: Taschen.

Bouman, O., 2006. Re:Orientation. In: Abrams, J. and Hall, P. ed., c2006. Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute.

Castells, M., 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eisenman, P., 1987. Houses of Cards. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisenman, P., 1987. Misreading. In: Eisenman, P., 1987. Houses of Cards. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisenman, P., 1999. Diagram Diaries. London: Thames & Hudson.

EPFL, 2011. Organicities. [online] Available at <http://design.epfl.ch/organicites/2010b/> [Accessed 11 Feb 2012].

Enwezor, O., 2003. Terminal Modernity. In: Enwezor, O. et al., 2003. What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Gere, C., 2008. Digital Culture. Rev ed. London: Reaktion.

Guiheux, A., 2003. Systems. In: Betsky, A. et al. Ed., 2003. Reading MVRDV. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Jett, M., 2010. The City of Culture / Eisenman Architects. ArchDaily.com [blog] 8 June 2011.

Available at: <http://www.archdaily.com/141238/the-city-of-culture-eisenman-architects/> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

REFERENCE LIST 3-1

Harris, J. L. and Taylor, P.A., 2005. Digital Matters: Theory and Culture of the Matrix. Abingdon: Routledge.

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King, J.J., 2006. The Node Knows. In: Abrams, J. and Hall, P. ed., c2006. Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute.

Jones, W., 2010. Big Forking Dilemma. [online] Available at: <http://internal.gsd.harvard.edu/ research/publications/hdm/back/32_Jones.pdf> [Accessed 01 December 2011].

Kipnis, J., 2004. Towards a New Architecture. In: Lynn, G., 2004. Folding in Architecture. Rev. ed.

Chichester: Wiley-Academy.

Leach, N., 2003. C<AMO>UFLAGE. In: Enwezor, O. et al., 2003. What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Lootsma, B., 2003. What is (really) to be Done? In: Betsky, A. et al. Ed., 2003. Reading MVRDV. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Lynn, G., Forms of Expression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in Architectural Design. In Lynn, G., (1998). Folds, Blobs and Bodies: Collected Essays. Belgium: La Lettre Volee.

Lynn, G., 2004. Folding in Architecture. Rev. ed. Chichester: Wiley-Academy.

Manaugh, G., 2011. Open Source Design. [online] Available at <http://www.domusweb.it/en/ architecture/open-source-design-02-wikileaks-guidecritical-infrastructure/> [06 Feb 2012].

Manaugh, G., 2011. Salt. [online] Available at <http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/salt.html> [11 Feb 2012].

Mitchell, W. J., 1995. City of Bits. London: MIT Press.

MVRDV, 1999. Metacity Datatown. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

MVRDV, 2005. KM3: Excursions on Capacities. Barcelona: Actar.

3-1 REFERENCE LIST

MVRDV, 2002. The REGIONMAKER, RheinRuhrCity. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz.

OCEAN, 1999. OCEAN. In: Zellner, P., 1999. Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture.

London: Thames & Hudson.

Rashid, H. and Couture, L. A., 2002. Flux : Asymptote. London: Phaidon.

Schumacher, P., 2009. Parametric Patterns, AD Architectural Design - Patterns of Architecture, [online] Available at: <http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametric%20Patterns.html> [Accessed 13 February 2012].

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Schumacher, P., 2010. Parametric Diagrams, The Diagrams of Architecture, AD Reader, [online] Available at: <http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametric%20Diagrammes.html> [Accessed 13 February 2012].

Speaks, M., 1996. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Out There: The formal limits of the American Avant-Garde. In: Toy, M. ed., 1998. Hypersurface Architecture. London: Architectural Design.

Van Weelden, D., 2006. Possible Worlds. In: Abrams, J. and Hall, P. ed., c2006. Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute.

REFERENCE LIST 3-1

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3-2 Bibliography - Books and Online Articles Abrams, J. and Hall, P. ed., c2006. Else/Where: Mapping: New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute.

AugĂŠ, M., 2008. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. 2nd Ed. London: Verso.

Betsky, A. et al. Ed., 2003. Reading MVRDV. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

BIG, 2010. Yes is More, an archicomic on architectural evolution. Los Angeles: Taschen.

Boeri, S. et al., 2001. Mutations. Barcelona: Actar.

Bullivant, L. ed., 2005. 4dspace: Interactive Architecture. Chichester: Wily.

Castells, M., 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eisenman, P., 1987. Houses of Cards. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eisenman, P., 1999. Diagram Diaries. London: Thames & Hudson.

Enwezor, O. et al., 2003. What is OMA: Considering Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.

Friedman, A., c2002. The Adaptable Home: Designing Homes for Change. London: McGraw-Hill.

Gere, C., 2008. Digital Culture. Rev ed. London: Reaktion.

3-2 BIBLIOGRAPHY books & online resources

Rashid, H. and Couture, L. A., 2002. Flux : Asymptote. London: Phaidon.

Harris, J. L. and Taylor, P.A., 2005. Digital Matters: Theory and Culture of the Matrix. Abingdon: Routledge.

Jones, W., 2010. Big Forking Dilemma. [online] Available at: <http://internal.gsd.harvard.edu/ research/publications/hdm/back/32_Jones.pdf> [Accessed 01 December 2011].

Koolhaas, R. And Obrist, H. U., 2011. Project Japan, Metabolism Talksâ&#x20AC;Ś Los Angeles: Taschen.

Kronenburg, R., 2007. Flexible: Architecture That Responds to Change. London: Laurence King.

Lynn, G., 2004. Folding in Architecture. Rev. ed. Chichester: Wiley-Academy.

Mass, W. et al., c2002. The Regionmaker, RheinRuhrCity. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz.

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Maas, W., 2003. Five Minutes City: Architecture and [im]mobility. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers.

Mitchell, W. J., 1995. City of Bits. London: MIT Press.

MVRDV, 1999. Metacity Datatown. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.

MVRDV, 2005. KM3: Excursions on Capacities. Barcelona: Actar.

MVRDV, c.2002. The REGIONMAKER, RheinRuhrCity. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz.

RAMTV, Steel, B. Ed., 2006. Negotiate My Boundary! : Mass-Customisation and Responsive Environments. Basel: Birkhauser.

Sakamoto, T. et al. Ed., c2007. From Control to Design : Parametric/Algorithmic Architecture.

Barcelona: Actar.

Schumacher, P., 2009. Parametric Patterns, AD Architectural Design - Patterns of Architecture, [online] Available at: <http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametric%20Patterns.html> [Accessed 13 February 2012].

Schumacher, P., 2010. Parametric Diagrams, The Diagrams of Architecture, AD Reader, [online] Available at: <http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametric%20Diagrammes.html> [Accessed 13 February 2012].

Schneider, T. and Till, J., 2007. Flexible Housing. London: Architectural Press.

Speaks, M., 1996. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Out There: The formal limits of the American Avant-Garde. In: Toy, M. ed., 1998. Hypersurface Architecture. London: Architectural Design. Unsure (need to check copy)

Zellner, P., 1999. Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson.

books & online resources :BIBLIOGRAPHY 3-2

Speaks, M., 1996.

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3-3 Bibliography Website Resources Dezeen, 2010. Cidade da Cultura de Galicia by Peter Eisenman. Dezeen.com [blog] 20 April 2010. Available at: <http://www.dezeen.com/2010/04/20/cidada-da-cultura-de-galicia-by-petereisenman/> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

EPFL, 2011. Organicities. [online] Available at <http://design.epfl.ch/organicites/2010b/> [Accessed 11 Feb 2012].

Farr, A., 2011. Datavista [online] Available at: <http://datascapedesign.wordpress.com/> [Accessed 11 Feb 2012].

Jett, M., 2010. The City of Culture / Eisenman Architects. ArchDaily.com [blog] 8 June 2011.

Available at: <http://www.archdaily.com/141238/the-city-of-culture-eisenman-architects/> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

Manaugh, G., 2011. Open Source Design. [online] Available at: <http://www.domusweb.it/en/ architecture/open-source-design-02-wikileaks-guidecritical-infrastructure/> [Accessed 06 February 2012].

Video Resources Actuarchitecture, 2011. 8 House par BIG Ă Copenhague [video online] Available at:< http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=bWkl7HoEluU> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

3-3 BIBLIOGRAPHY websites & video resources

Archdaily, 2011. AD Interviews: Peter Eisenman. [video online] Available at:<http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=HP8ifcS8wMw> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

Conselleriadecultura, 2011. City of Culture (English). [video online] Available at:<http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=GeY_bEak2Go> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

Estherparedes1, 2009. Peter Eisenman. [video online] Available at:< http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5dHZ-Zy9l5w> [Accessed 18 February 2012].

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3-4 Bibliography Image Resources [Arnhem Central - Masterplan] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://unstudiocdn3.hosting.kirra. nl//uploads/original/9238a04e-5356-49fa-a14e-9d24f12db238/1308560675> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

BIG. [8 House Diagram 07] n.d. [diagram] Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wpcontent/uploads/2010/10/1287601460-8h-diagram-by-big-07.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

BIG. [8 House Diagram 08] n.d. [diagram] Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wpcontent/uploads/2010/10/1287601461-8h-diagram-by-big-08.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

BIG. [8 House Diagram 11] n.d. [diagram] Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/ uploads/2010/10/1287601468-8h-diagram-by-big-11.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

[Cardiff aerz] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://www.basilisk.com/C/cab_card/cardiffaerz. jpeg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

[Cardiff Oval View] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://www.basilisk.com/C/cab_card/ cardiffovalview.jpeg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

[The City of Culture Plans] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/1307376582-plans-647x1000.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

[The City of Culture Sections 1] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/ wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1307376595-sections1-647x1000.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

Luftfoto, D. [8 House Aerial] n.d. [photograph]. Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wpcontent/uploads/2010/10/1287612743-8h-image-by-dragor-luftfoto-01-1000x630.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

Farr, A., 2011. Scalar System of Definition [diagram]. Available at: <http://datascapedesign.files. wordpress.com/2012/04/scalar-system-of-definition2.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

Malagamba, D. The City of Culture n.d. [photograph]. Available at: <http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/ wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1307375504-0060167-511.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

Manaugh, G., 2011. Dymaxion Base Corretta [image online]. Available at: <http://put.edidomus.it/ domus/binaries/imagedata/big_350465_7001_dymaxion-base-corretta-DEF12.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

image resources :BIBLIOGRAPHY 3-4

Farr, A., 2011. Edinburgh Old Town Interactive Model [photograph]. Available at: <http:// datascapedesign.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/img_7320.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

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[NaCl: NE Distribution] n.d. [image online]. Available at: <http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WiNiZZsKWJ0/ Tme3gN5lwHI/AAAAAAAACyo/BrLPqqvcQIE/s1600/web-2northeast.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

[NaCl: NE Imports] n.d. [image online]. Available at: <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zVLmPhrwGdw/ Tme3gpLGs4I/AAAAAAAACzA/f6q148QvApw/s1600/web-5imports.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

[Chamberworks Installation] n.d. [image online]. Available at: <http://payload.cargocollective. com/1/0/31598/390362/chamberworks10_2.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

Patt, T., 2010. Big Forking Diagram [image online]. Available at: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/ trevorpatt/5097917412/> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

[Understanding USA 1] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://infosthetics.com/archives/ understandingusa.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

[Understanding USA 2] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://infosthetics.com/archives/ understandingusa2.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

[Understanding USA 3] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://infosthetics.com/archives/ understandingusa3.jpg> [Accessed 6 April 2012].

[Winy_03_BIG] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://put.edidomus.it/domus/binaries/imagedata/ WINY_03_BIG.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

[Winy_08_BIG] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://put.edidomus.it/domus/binaries/imagedata/ WINY_08_BIG.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

3-4 BIBLIOGRAPHY image resources

[Winy_09_BIG] n.d. [image online] Available at: <http://put.edidomus.it/domus/binaries/imagedata/ WINY_09_BIG.jpg> [Accessed 7 April 2012].

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Part IV Appendices

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4-1 Examples of Architects’ Usage of Digital Methods In addition to using data to respond to the digital society, each of the discussed architects are often outspoken and commited to different uses of digital technology.

Peter Eisenman, for example, in addition to using digital technology to access and analyse GIS data to manipulate the physical drivers for the project, has a complex relationship with digital technology and our era. In an interview with ArchDaily (2011), he discusses how the internet has enabled his work to happen instantaneously, with instant communication between international associate architects. However, he argues that it also doesn’t speed up his real work, which still occurs either physically on site or at his office, something that will not change. Likewise he does not utilise social networking nor will he network with clients and critics.

By limiting his working methods to the physical world and refusing to embrace digital social networking ability, it could be argued that Eisenman’s interiority and self-contained work is a byproduct of his working attitude, and vice versa. While a product of his era, this interaction with the digital could potentially be what informs and develops his ideas of interiority.

Comparatively, MVRDV’s work heavily with digital media to visualise and create their projects, with GIS data collection systems functioning heavily in their work. Together with the intensely

interrelated parametric systems they create with the Regionmaker project, the working method MVRDV choose to follow is a complete product of the digital era, both being enabled by it, and utilising its new challenges as a core design issue throughout their work.

BIG, meanwhile, have embraced multimedia presentation, using virtual overlays and video to communicate their work in a unique branded manner than fully integrates with digital technology.

This method of communicating their work is increasing in popularity, particularly within the social

examples of architects’ usage of digital methods :APPENDICES 4-1

Lynn’s relationship with the digital state is much more positive and integrated than that of his mentor. His advanced form finding methods, and the animate variability that give them their authorless character could not exist in their development state outside of the computer, though he writes in the introduction to Folding in Architecture (Lynn, 2004), that architects were trending towards complex forms even pre-digital means, which in “some case facilitated by, often mimicking in anticipation of, or were asking for the assistance from,” (p.10) advanced CAD packages. In essence, these architects were creating a “new model of formal and spatial complexity before the advent of inexpensive, ubiquitous, spline modelling software” (p.10). Lynn continues arguing this point, discussing that these architects would (and were) creating this architecture before, and without, depending on CAD programs. While this may be the case, the progression of this variable architecture has become increasingly intertwined with digital technology, such that advanced software is the enabler that has pushed advanced form finding beyond wilful design into authorless, through the ability to animate and create infinite infinitesimally different variations to create an optimum solution.

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As the digital avant-garde forge advances into digital architectures, and the profession as a whole begins to undertake more digital practices and considerations, the positioning of each within their usage of digital technology will become more and more important. As can be seen with the ages of the practices listed, the youngest, BIG, is the most open to grasping at digital connectivity and communication at a more accessible digital level, something that will probably we seen at an

4-1 APPENDICES: examples of architectsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; usage of digital methods

increasing level in the future.

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4-2 Blog Archive - Research & Development

This archive collates the collected knowledge gathered during the inception, research and writing stages of the study, and represents the complete knowledge base assembled over the past year.

In the development of the posts, the style changes significantly from a collection of quotes and precedents to a more considered approach to each book tackled. There includes in these pages elements of research that did not make it into the final version of the study, but the knowledge helped to shape the understanding of the work within.

All images contained in the following pages are available on the blog, and are referenced on the website.

http://datascapedesign.wordpress.com/

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4-2.01 2011/06/12 Mediating Mediums - Augmented Reality Using Digital Means Greg Tran, Thesis Prize winner at the Harvard Graduate School 2011.

Exploring the use of digital design and data in a more integrated continuous manner, that extends beyond the initial data as design constraints in the plan to an augmented reality using so-called “digital 3d.”

4-2 APPENDICES: blog archive - research & development

Why I blog this: what if the uses of digital 3d as augmented reality does not merely influence social interaction and personal needs, but also aids the building, such that the building as object is not final as such, but exists in a state of flux – what if the parameters change halfway through the building lifespan the object is able to actively react and adapt to the new environmental and social conditions?

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4-2.02 2011/06/15 7.5th Floor - Datacity Essay “the city itself is becoming part of the Internet with a world of data moved piece by piece and collided against a open source toolchain and methodology”. – Ben Cerveny “I experienced the fundamental utility of “beautiful” visualization as part of investigation process, to attract attention of cities stakeholders, stimulate the dialogue and stretch the imagination.”

“MIT Senseable City Lab’s seminal project WikiCity exemplifies the implementation of this feedback loop mechanism. This urban demo proposed a visualization platform for the citizen of Rome to view on large screens the city’s dynamics in real-time (e.g. presence of crowd, location of buses, awareness of events). This platform enabled people, participating to the Notte Bianca event, to become prime actors themselves, appropriating dynamically the city and the event.

Besides the importunity of this type of responsive environment to improve the experience of a city, it raises challenges to design the mechanisms by which these services are provisioned and understand for which activity that citizens utilize them for?”

GeoCommons all quotes/links from 7.5th Floor/Fabien Girardin Why I Blog This this essay (unfortunately unpublished) presents some interesting examples of uses of data in the real environment, admittedly not necessarily related to built form, but if this data can somehow transcend the built form and present an opportunity to design and building inclusive of outside stimuli and operation, why should it be ignored?

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4-2.03 2011/06/15 Five Minutes City - Winy Maas/MVRDV All quotes taken from Five Minutes City, Winy Maas/MVRDV “(Vedran Mimica) Maas’s method worked in a sense that by using and exposing data and hard facts students in Architecture produced the work without losing the ability to simultaneously employ intelligence and imagination” (7) “redesign the cities… in a way that everything is reachable within 5 minutes” (6) “recently finished office buildings change ownership within 3 years after realisation” (20) “can they not create a ‘lighter’ form of urbanism that is more dominated by temporality, changeability, flexibility and accomodation then (sic) by eternity and monumentality” (20) “the process of ‘change’ depends a lot of parameters- political, economical, social” (47) “they (software packages and parameters) can become a device that not only suggests and compares, but also one that stores all knowledge, old and new. It can then be used anywhere” (131) “functionmixer- applies parameters to a zone ‘function’ and locates the optimum position for it in a 3d space, with other zones to create optimised zone/function arrangement” (134)

4-2 APPENDICES: blog archive - research & development

“Regionmaker (large scale functionmixer) applied to Cataluna, under one parameter (migration) to counteract ageing population” (148) Why I Blog This: this book functions as a record of a workshop led by Winy Maas to propose to students a city reachable within 5 minutes. This lead to investigations of scale over different forms of transport – one type or a mix of them? This reveals a starting point of desired outcome to influence data-input to determine form, yet another usage type of the data-method.

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4-2.04 2011/06/15 KM3 - MVRDV All quotes taken from KM3, MVRDV “the ambition for a wider scale requires a combination of idealism and pragmatism, of research and practice, of large and small scales. In this respect relatively small projects can be seen as tests or positioned as experiments.” (40)

“spanning between research and appropriation, fiction and science, architecture will be a permanent testing ground that keeps in touch with an accelerating world.” (42) “a combination of analyses with proposals… consequently, when architecture is a device, its products can be understood as ‘instruments’ of general observations, as ‘messages’ of urban transactions and criticisms, as ‘facilitators’ for development and acceleration and as ‘communicators’ of wider processes and agendas… architecture will become a medium again.”

(45) Foret MLM Montceau-les Mines rapidly declining countryside despite money injection into road links and ‘futile’ themeparks “Industrial installations, factories are closing down, abandoned. What to do with these sites?” (104) “how many theme parks can France and Europe handle? How many hypermarches should be installed?” (104)

“by giving the terrain back to nature… Montceau National Park, with the existing factory as a contemporary ruin” (112) ruins painted with thick polyurethane paint to maintain structure while flora overgrows.

Hyper-Catalunya Catalonia – Research shows ageing populations with low birth rate and high emigration not helping. Proposal to draw in high levels of foreign, younger immigrants- reinforce Catalan.

Spread out suburbia- reinforce individuality Proposal: Barcelona optimises harbor, “the point at which the different cultures trade with the world.” (119) “Garden of Babel. Sprawl Global Temporal Immigration” (120) Low density, language changes

blog archive - research & development :APPENDICES 4-2

“maybe the reduction of population pressure on the countryside helps to establish these rediscovered qualities. By accepting that people leave, the countryside can turn back into nature or vineyards again” (112)

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frequently. Promote individuality. “a confetti of identities” (120) 3-D City “Can an urbanism be developed that enters the third dimension in a time when urbanism is still dominated by zoning- a very two-dimensional approach.” (271) “how can the process of densification be brought one step further?” an exploration of high-density cities over multiple literal levels. Size calculated per person per zone of required self-sustaining city (272) 20% Food, 40% Oxygen – “this stresses the need to work on these domains, which have been so intensely neglected by the architectural and urban tradition” (280) appox. 59km^3 per 100km^3 air circulation including pipes, leads to 5x5x5km cube. Given urban spacing, this system can house 800x current population (280) valley shaped crop fields- crops need 2hrs/day to grow- this maximises growth per space. (290-2) “each crop adopts its preferred position. For rice and bananas, valleys that provide 12hrs of sunlight were created.” (297) Mass for crops taken from total as most required sunlight/exposure (312) Forest “in the lower part of the cube in artificial grottos” (318)

4-2 APPENDICES: blog archive - research & development

Wind tunnels (curved, venturi effect), biomass generators with open pockets. Solar powered mountaintops at valley peaks (otherwise, too cold) Waste 100% recycled, reused or incinerated. Sputnik-like pipes.

Water internal lakes and top-end basins. Tranport via gravity and waterfalls. Tanks at top for distribution.

“Housing in tall towers that are cut when interacting with agri-valleys, resulting in new forms with large lobbies in each” (414-5) “needs optimising – but reduced need for cars – new means of transport/circulation more air to avoid claustrophobia. Worth pursuing?(418) Not a realistic, other factors not considered, would drastically change the city.

Why I Blog This: a collection of data-led experiments within the context of urban and future-

design. The data used here is used as a generator for the brief, as opposed to the form (in the case of Catalunya and Foret MLM), however in the 3D city both are combined – as each requirement is chipped away from the ‘block’ of density, a unique form is produced. How can this route be explored further.

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Hierarchies of use defining form in a top-down manner, form follows function and optimisation through data.

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4-2.05 2011/06/15 Metacity Datatown - MVRDV All quotes taken from Metacity Datatown, MVRDV. “continued demand for the specialties of “elsewhere” make every region dependant on a series of others, thus enforcing a symbiotic balance among them” (17) “athough they [professionals in Architecture and Urbanism] advocate ‘discourse’ with other

professions and they suggest this advocacy with ‘open forms’ they hardly escape the formalistic.”

(17) “by selecting or connecting data according to hypothetical prescriptions, a world of numbers turns into diagrams” (18)

“this observation of considerable lack of space could trigger a series of extrapolations, scenarios, ‘what-ifs’… pursuing this sequence of hypotheses leads to a town of data” (19) “what agenda would result from this numerical approach?” (58) “it therefore has to be self-supporting. Its problems must be solved within its boundaries” (59) Zone-Living Conclusions: “if we spread the required volume more or less equally over sector living it would lead to a tapestry of plots measuring 20×10 metres with streets of 10 and 5 metres wide, and an average height of 28 metres or 10 stories.” (82)

4-2 APPENDICES: blog archive - research & development

“the sector would turn into a vertical garden city.” (88-9) vegetarian society takes up half the space of meat-eating.

Zone-CO2 Conclusions: “if we produced all energy with windmills, the total CO2 output will be reduced by 29.7%. 1km^2 of windmills replaces 37.7km^2 of CO2 machines.” (138) Interview (Winy Maas (WM), Arno Van Der Mark (AvdM), Jan van Grunsven (JvG), Hans van der Cammen (HvdC), Ronald van Tienhoven (RvT), AWH Doctors van Leeuwen (DvL)). “(WM) Architecture and Art went ‘global’ quite a while back” (198) “(JvG) as long as the individual has a need for a space to ‘meet’ or a space to share a common interest, we have to consider the meaning and form of those spaces” (199) “(JvG) the result will be an obvious decomposition of what has been known up until now as public space.

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(WM) at the moment that you’re saying this, is the role that art plays in public space different?”

(200) “(JvG) the artist enters a situation that can be compared to that of an architect, whose work is always accompanied by conditions, and in this sense the architect contributes to the design of public space” (200) “(WM) the act of ‘taking things to extremes’ seems to attach itself solidly to ‘data’ and to want to influence existing data” (201)

“(AvdM) Personally I use the number to reach a hypothesis when I’m working on a commission of taking a certain position” (201) “(JvG) Statistics are often used as proof in an argument. Statistics can sub-stantiate arguments” (201) “(AvdM) Art has always been a representational discipline, and this aspect is simply disappearing.”

(201) “(HvdC) We’re becoming a society tremendously orientated toward individualisation” (210) “(RvT) collecting data and coupling it (art related or utilitarian) are activities requiring a study that should have a certain visual quality in and of itself” (214) “(RvT) Art and architecture should be able to take this information and use it with skill and sensitivity” (214)

blog archive - research & development :APPENDICES 4-2

Why I Blog This: MVRDV uses the topic of data collection and appropriation in ways to extend the current place of society and extrapolate potential scenarios and outcomes – in this case the use of data is applied to a dense city and defining zones of usage (the ideas expressed in this book are better explored in 3D City within KM3).

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4-2.06 2-11/06/15 Negotiate My Boundary! - RAMTV All quotes from Negotiate My Boundary!, RAMTV. “the thesis simulations a parametric design process initially introduced in the project by means of active web-based user participation” (5) Section 1.1 Systems “the architect defines the building blocks as well as the rules of spatial combination and manipulation, which together structure the design process as a form of participatory game” (13) “the emphasis shifts away from a definitive final design outcome, towards the question of investigating and steering a game of vital appropriation and negotiation through which the system will develop” (13) “this (internet communication) is also the domain in which genuinely participatory design process finally become plausible” (13) Subjects Boundaries Negotiations, Christopher Hight “Shifting away from more typical design instruments toward the parametric use of telecommunications software in a generative capacity- formally, spatially and strategically” (18) AADRL Design Studio Brief 01, Patrick Schumacher

4-2 APPENDICES: blog archive - research & development

“Social system that constitute and maintain themselves primarily through architecture” (20) RAMTV “Data of ‘social realities’ collected to gauge what configuration of housing groups exist in contemporary society e.g. age, no., familial context” (64) “matrix of all possible households calculated” (68) Section 2.1 Parameters “Establishment of ‘neighbourhood rules’ and ‘time-dependent overlapping of neighbourhoods’ use of programmatic specificity to determine parameters of neighbourhood and optimise their opening times and locations” (106) “rules for the development of the neighbourhoods guide the distribution of programme, which implies considerable sectional overlapping” (107) “modulation of access, light, sound, circulation and visibility” (107) “deformation (with) preservation of selected existing buildings” (107)

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“a client inputs control key spatial organisations.” (108) “the formation of the overall complex as well as the specific clusters and units are the outcome of the client input and design constraints” (108) “the specific design parameters guiding the emergence of these aggregations include: organisational system (hyperattached system) geometric constraints combination principles (interpenetration)” (110) e.g. “four persons, including two single and a couple, decide to share their home. Private spaces are reduced to sleeping and hygiene, the rest being shared” (112) “combination of designer- and user-/client-defined parameters: Designer: spatial organisation system, light, structure, access, site conditions.

User: relation to open space, and to the ground, social relation among members, sharing, renting and public principles” (116) “simulating extreme client-user response parameters” (118-119) online preferences questionnaire determines (for example) “a user’s preferences for interior activity arrangements” (123)

“lofting process, or morphological transition of one shape section into another, along a path” (127) “the matrix displays all possible variations allowed by the overlapping areas of particular genotype clusters” (128) “takes data of living from residents and applies to inter-relating venn-like diagrams of arrangements in socio-living environments” (132) “customising boundaries with louvres and telescopic wires to transfer loads” (136) “different kinds of performance can be scripted in order to react to the activities and movement of single or multiple users, testing the limits of today’s techniques for establishing interactive, responsive buildings” (136) “around the bathing-activity space the boundary in the way that louvres face the subject with normal- total dynamic visual enclosure – indirect light in space” (142)

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“users start choosing activities they want their home to perform which are directly negotiated with neighbours” (124)

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“scripted boundaries to face her with the edge – public space – transparent” (142) “the answers to an initial questionnaire provide the planner with information about intentions, leading to the clarification of initial unit genotypes” (144) “the ground deforms according to a lower level of neighbourhood geometry, allowing the installation of multiple circulation routes” (164) Why I Blog This: RAMTV take an interesting approach to the concept of using data to determine

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form and built object, with one of the only examples found so-far of true social parameter usage.

Their design revolves around the community providing information to correctly arrange and intertwine their complex apartments.

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4-2.07 2011/06/16 Parametric Precedents Unless otherwise stated, all projects found/quote within From Control to Design, ed. by Tomoko Sakamoto et al.

Puppet Theatre at the Carpenter Centre

Puppet Theater, at the Carpenter Centre Parametric constraints include: Arrangement of the Diamond panel unit (limitations of Site, Fabrication, Structural Integrity, and Use); Four foot drop from wall detemining raked seating; Independent of structural supports and ceiling.

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Ballroom Drive-In

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Screen to structural curve achieved using Rhino scripting and Catia modelling, with Structure, Fabrication, Acoustics and Economics tested simultaneously during the manipulation of a series of control points along the curve.

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Serpentine Gallery, 2002 From the Advanced Geometry Unit at Arup (AGU), “Our challenge became that of finding a rule, an algorithm that would generate that chaos with its intricate beauties, but with an underlying order that would allow the realisation of the pavilion in fourteen weeks.” (36, From Control to Design).

The points were connected, halfway along one side to the third-way point on the next (1/2 to 1/3): “Our approach is very often to start from an arbitrary point and critically examine the multiple outcomes that yield from modifying the starting rule.” (37). The pattern of lines was extended 550mm to become the structural roof beams and wall planes became “diagonal lines of a braced wall plane” (40).

Open Systems: Approaching Novel Parametric Domains / p.art at AKT Parametric softwares are often employed in design processes of rationalisation and postrationalisation where, given a certain project, the answer to specific problems is required to actualise the desire shape [problem solving approach]. (119) Simplexity / Sawako Kajima, Michalatos Panagiotis The idea that a lot of parametric design is merely using simple programs to generate complex forms, whereas, and this is what I’m interested in, there is the view that there is “a whole class of algorithms that deal with simplification which are usually more complex and difficult to implement” (130). However, this simplicity is often not apparent: “the simple might arise in different invisible layers of the design and formal regularity might actually decline as a result of the application of such algorithms.” (131) Why I Blog This: While the cases, particularly the later ones, focus primarily on the structural

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and physical manufacture of the parametric output, there is some interesting ideas here, primarily among the initial projects, such as the Puppet Theater, whose form came about through more programmatic and social concerns. Likewise the structure of the Serpentine Gallery interests me, as instead of focusing on itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parametric optimisation, the form arises from more abstract, traditional rules and order based design.

However, the book reinforces the fact that structural parametrics is not what interests me here, my architectural interest lies more in how social rules and structure can be applied through parametrics to a built form.

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4-2.08 2011/06/16 Reading MVRDV: Aaron Betsky et al.

All quotes from Reading MVRDV, author as noted. “(Veronique Patteeuw) ‘image’, ‘icon’, and ‘concept’ are being replaced by the new keywords ‘function’, ‘context’ and ‘materiality.’” (7) MVRDV: The Matrix Project / Aaron Betsky “They take on the job of giving shape to those zeroes and ones” (11) “What is an appropriate architecture for the information age?” (13) “MVRDV feel that the ready manipulability of data allows them to treat architecture as a form of research” (13) “their [Koolhaas/Gehry] desire to produce buildings that translated scientific, social, and economic conditions into form…” (15) “It also made many architects suspicious of form. They preferred engineering diagrams, urban models, statistics and systems to the arbitrary fixing in time of space implicit in autonomous form.”

(15) “the project is not just defined by building, but can also be theoretical speculation or research endevour.” (17)

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“the project appears to turn abstract statistical information into concrete form.” (17) “proposing new forms of architecture that might blur the distinction between abstract and concrete, information and form, and real and unreal.” (17) “Precisely because MVRDV’s projects are both real and unreal, speculative, and concrete, projects and projections, they have the ability to make such vague ideas into places we can experience.” (23) What is (really) to be done? / Bart Lootsma “having found a method for understanding architecture, urbanism, and regional planning as a continuous field…” (25) “it is a landscape that consists of data, in other words a datascape” (25) “introducing a process of negotiation that in large part generates the design” (27) “datascapes appeared to provide a way to understand the development of the environment in a more general way” (27) “Psychological issues, calamity-management patterns, lighting regulations, acoustic treatments –

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all these manifestations can be seen as “scapes” of the data behind it” (31) “It was much more about pointing out that society itself, a democratic society with all its complex rules, its peoples working together could produce more than mere mediocrity, if only architects were willing to take collective demands, desires and fears seriously instead of focusing on their own signature and stardom – particularly as society grows denser and denser.” (31) “the aesthetical aspect of their architecture is usually the most neglected.” (35) “in a massive ‘sea of uniqueness’ the individual object simples ceases to exist. In this massiveness, architecture becomes synonymous with urbanism.” (35) “one may argue that numbers, used in this way, form a language as well” (35) “MVRDV uses data as a kind of intermediate language, between other languages – a language that allows translation of one language into another.” (35) “this is not primarily a matter of language, but of organisation” (37) “the act of translation a mathematical act” (37) “MVRDV’s outspoken optimistic belief in democracy and in society as something that can be made is extremely important and courageous.” (43) “[Metacity/Datatown] demonstrates how datascapes can be applied in political decision making on large-scale planning issues by showing the spatial consequences of transformations of collective behaviours in the constructed landscape.” (43)

“the collective risks presented to the audience in Pig City and Metacity/Datatown are so enormous and unfathomable that they become almost irrational and therefore very difficult to deal with.” (47) “address the issue of externalisation with projects like the Regionmaker, in which he graphically demonstrates… migration pressures and issues of food and energy production on a global level.”

(51) “it is the task of architects and planners, together with politicians, to come up with concepts, proposals, projects and plans that allow us to make serious choices, giving us an indication of – to paraphrase Lenin – what is really to be done?” (61) Architecture at the end of History / Irenee Scalbert “the range and scale of these forces has become so great that culture manifests itself in developments which can only be grouped with the help of statistics” (65)

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“A number of ‘what-if’ scenarios are unleashed in this city to examine the implication for the urban environment” (45)

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“today’s architects must find the sources of their creativity in the chaos of cities” (67) “their job is to translate hard data into concrete landscapes” (67) “the city as a whole is reclaimed as a giant experiment, an impromptu work of art, a momentary ideal negotiated by architects within the barrage of demands pouring forth from the liberal economy and our consumer society” (71) Vertical Labyrinth / Jean Attali “Applied to geography, to a ground surface, to spatial arrangements, to societal structures, or to charts and rules, the idea of context is laughable. It telescopes multiple orders of reality, without any apparent relationship among them” (73) “it is possible to contemplate the relationship between architecture and the space that surrounds it and establish multiple conditions (whether physical or symbolic) binding architecture to its environments” (73) “architectural invention in the present must not be inhibited by habits from the past.” (75) “[context refers] to information drawn from all the resources of science and technology as well as economic and political data” (75) “leads to the substitution of a synthetic landscape and a sort of hyper-functionalism for the conventional references of site and programme” (75) “architecture energetically assumes urban design’s large scale and comprehensive vision.” (75)

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“MVRDV imagines its buildings in cross-section and erects them like vertical labyrinths.” (75) “utopian core of MVRDV’s designs” (77) “MVRDV proposes an approach to these themes by playing both sides of the net: to extend the ecological reserves of tomorrow, even to imagine a new pastoral era, begin with a tenfold increase in urban density. To protect nature, let’s be metabolists!” (79) “Lead to a dreamland of statistical histograms and exponential projections” (81) “for the iterations of traditional design, MVRDV substitutes an endless journey in the databases, another form of labyrinth” (81) “the idea that architectural form might sculpt a database” (81) Artificial Ecology / Stan Allen “the working method of MVRDV is to conduct extensive research, assemble massive quantities of data, and then set out, rationally and objectively, to resolve the problem” (83)

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“they utilise the conventional tools of the architect but these are supplemented by statistical methods, abstract diagrams, and information mapping.” (83) “Form is explained in relation to the information it encodes; architecture as a series of switches, circuits or relays activating assemblages of matter and information” (83) “they go beyond ‘common sense’ because the known solutions are incapable of solving the problems posed.” (83) “MVRDV’s works make visible the invisible forces that shape building today” (83) “In articulating the specific means available to architecture to encode social, economic and political information, MVRDV open architecture to other discourses” (85) “they are more interested in the spatial or material effects of information that in xenographic or discursive effects” (85) “idea of an ‘urban landscape’ suggests that a building is not something that occupies the site, but rather, that the activity of the architect is to construct the site” (85) “hence ‘process’ for MVRDV implies not so much the process of design, but the process of negotiation, implementation and construction – all those aspects of architecture that surface after the design work is completed” (87) All quotes from Reading MVRDV, author as noted.

Form Follows Fiction / Jens Bosman

“form is the result of hypothesis, extrapolation and argument: a datascape loaded with programmes” (95) “private and public life are mixed mercilessly” (97) “to plans like those of Van der Broek and Bakema for the city centre of Eindhoven, the town for which MVRDV have developed various projects” (97) “paid too little attention to the feelings of people outside the worlds of business and bureaucracy” (97) “MVRDV publicise practically nothing about the way they design” (97) “Mega-city more accurately describes the urban ideas which underlies the concepts of MVRDV and others from the OMA school” (97)

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“As has always been the case in the history of architecture, the fact that designs are modelled on earlier examples must not be allowed to lead to the accusation of pure plagiarism” (93)

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“the flowing, continuous surfaces and the extremely jutting forms bear clear witness to surplus energy (pulling, bending, pressing, pushing etc.)” (99) “to make mass radiate space” (99) “no more of the ‘lasagne’ that van Berkel and MVRDV experimented with, but neutral, rectangular volumes, although not arranged to be independent of one another as in Mies’s case, but stacked and ‘interlocking’” (101) “it pays to study diagrams, particularly of traffic conditions” (103) “the traffic diagram reveals itself to be a datascape, which rather than shaving away, suggests integrating further programmes into the traffic intensity diagram” (103) Systems / Alain Guiheux “architects have attempted to return to an architecture of facts” (105) “layouts is the way things are arranged, placed in relation to one another, in order to achieve an effect that goes beyond their mere arrangement” (105) “shedding all architectural language, devising projects without language” (107) “automobile traffic flows… are the language of an architecture of networks and of activities” (107)

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“sets of complex activities mean that architecture resides in this capacity to link, divide, bring together, set up hierarchies” (107) “architecture no longer has anything to do with either the object or the so-called ‘visual’ arts, much less with a language- at most with typography and graphic design.” (109) “they are primarily programmatic and positive and have reconnected with concepts of strategy, position and force rather than of form” (109) “‘system’ describes an active architecture as opposed to the ‘representative’ architectures that have successively attempted to represent urban chaos, mathematical fractals, deconstruction, cybernetics, biology, consumerism, the dematerialisation of the world, etc” (109) “possibility of intervention in the utilitarian quality of housing” (111) “the system truly becomes a stake in the game when one considers how it serves to modify our practices and our perception of the global environment” (111) “[Maison du Peuple] is viewed as if its prime issue were that of the system, uniting technique and movement in order to create novel associations of functions and uses (marketplace and spectacle), sensations and images (screen and sky) – machinery without the appearance of machinery” (111)

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“the Maison du Peuple is the dissappearance of its aesthetic: a metal box that thinks only of potential industrial occupants” (111) “[Foucault conceives it] is not so much a property as a strategy, and its effects are not attributable to appropriation but to manoeuvres, to tactics, to techniques, to operations.” (113) “for Koolhaas, the point was to defend an architecture for its own sake, that the architectural object as such was the quality of the project” (117) “‘for MVRDV’ the architecture object is only what passes, in a momentary context, for an architecture whose finality lies elsewhere” (117) “the Hanover Pavilion inaugurates an architecture that jettisons any stylistic preoccupation exclusive to architecture, except to understand its fictional character, appropriately ‘dropped there,’ as aestheticisation” (117)

We’re all expects now / Philippe Morel “their project implied a critique of the process of standardisation – the remains of ideology dissolved into the democratic world” (123) “application of the principle of differentiation to the concept of collective housing” (123) “there was nothing in MVRDV’s discourse putting forth urbanism as the solution” (123) “ever since modernism all architects have felt obliged to design the ideal house… there is no longer any ideal home; there are thousands of ideal homes” (125)

“MVRDV’s objective was not so much to pass and document a judgement on architectural culture as to propose a critical method to be applied to it” (125) “Social creativity should be encouraged and, what’s more, welcomed” (127) “The fact that MVRDV members don’t do anything with the data they’re given can’t be criticised because that’s actually one of the best things about their work” (127) “the most celebrated of the concepts invented by MVRDV is datascaping… data of all kinds are collected, treated and ‘scaped’” (129) “but datascaping is more than a denunciation of bureaucratic regimes and international organisations (129) “as a method of analysis it ties together different fields, rejecting specialisation, while maintaining the critical perspective of a possible ‘universal expertise’” (129)

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“their architectural projects also bring out the relativity of the values espoused by western urbanism” (125)

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“as a method of interpretation, it allows architects to master a world that in reality is far beyond their ken” (129) “nature is no longer the great referent… it has become fragmented, encircled, reconstituted, and simulated. Its management has transformed it into a databank, a simulated environment” (AF Schmid) (131) “Can we find an intelligent way to expand the capacities of what already exists?” (131) “datascaping is a form of statistical analysis that brings out that methods’ cultural and ideological underpinnings, and, paradoxically, especially its creative potential” (131) “MVRDV do not see science and technology as dichotomic” (131) “this endlessly generic world is strongly guided by economic and environmental forces that reduce the autonomy of architecture” (133) “A round of self-criticism (at the very least) in Architecture and urban planning and even a redefinition of the practice” (19) [Metacity/Datatown] “datascaping is a contribution to MVRDV’s efforts to isolate out the structures that make up our society while rejecting the false comparisons’ “Quantitative data is beautiful” (135) Architecture is a Device / Winy Maas

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“the reduced possibilites of experimental architectures because of economic and political crises” (139) “‘Swallowing’ the newest thoughts, techniques, and aesthetics has become the latest strategy among architects in order to compete or even survive in the commercial battle” (139) “how visible can Architecture’s message be? How can it criticise and transform programmes in collaboration with clients, who – overwhelmed by their targets – might not be interested?” (143) “Work not only on buildings but on regional planning as well” (143) “It can create tools that accompany the production of architecture or urban planning, as in the Functionmixer or the Regionmaker” (145) “…to the seemingly directionless analyses presented as research in the 2000s by way of experiments based on extrapolations and constructions for large-scale awareness” (145) “the individual meets the collective again” (147) Why I Blog This: This book, while focusing mostly upon the work of MVRDV, also expands its

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viewpoint, particularly in later chapters, to the wider scope of data in design, and what it means, for both form, programme, the profession and their users. Using the quotes in this book it is possible to deepen points as to why data should be used, and how best to utilise it at all.

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4-2.09 2011/06/18 Information Urbanism I have stumbled across a .pdf online discussing the uses of information in parametric design, referencing particularly at the beginning, the work of Zaha Hadid and Patrick Schumacher, however, in line with the research I intend to undertake, they believe the work of Hadid/ Schumacher to be too controlled by form and shape, while “the integration of demographics, cultural and human factors into this computer controlled equation (virtually molded with points, lines, planes, and volumes) has not been fully discussed under the umbrella of parametric design.”

The authors intend to use Geospatial information through GIS to produce ”2D patterns,3D forms, and experiments various methods to represent the information physically.”

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The authors are interested in taking social data, intangible information and applying it to a physical reality. “The research team manipulated the quantifiable GIS data of two case studies, Cincinnati, Ohio and Savannah, Georgia by computing political, social, and economic data into the 3D topographic representation.” The authors intend to present their results as physical diagrams as opposed to completely realised proposals and investigated “the integration of non-geometrical parameters such as age, gender, race, poverty level, education level, employment status, family income, and method to travel” The authors approach this topic of course, from an urbanism standpoint, utilising their acquired GIS data to influence large scale forms, whereas in my study I intend to take a more focused view of this course of action and apply these methods to individual, or small urban, forms and structures.

“Information modeling comprises of infinite possibilities with controllable variables within a parametric framework. These variables are then run through a series of alterations to morph into abstract urban forms.” Through modified Grasshopper and MEL scripts within Rhino and Maya, the authors utilise census and GIS data to create color-coded thematic maps through which parameters are applied to derive form. Grasshopper was used to extract the information from the thematic maps through the use of a script.

This information was applied to a Rhino form model and calculated for a laser-cut physical model

from which pattern and power of the laser was calculated through the data discovered through the scripting. In the author’s words “the dimensional and physical model becomes an object that not only represents the combination of various GIS data sets, but also displays the unseen spatial pattern and sparked the unique design solutions.” Through their interaction with a physical model, the authors claim to gain a new design thought method that provides new glimpses into previously unseen spatial patterns.

The author’s parametric control of the entire process enables them to process and create many iterations of their models in a short space of time, while “it is the interplay between the digital and the physical that this idea of information urbanism develops possibilities that are empowering and justified.”

Through the use of parametric design and GIS data, the team assembled a digital urban map for

the production of a video game. Using their data, “a population density map is used to control the

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placement of community centers and public space.”

“As the system of shading elements wraps around the façade the spacing, shape and orientation of the individual elements gradually transform and adapt to the specific exposure conditions of their respective location on the façade. The result is a gradient, continuously changing façade pattern that optimizes sun-protection relative to light intake for each point on the façade” The authors state in their conclusion that “design practice begins with the information,” and that their script is in an ongoing process and is open-source to the community.

Further Reading Schumacher Parametric City Patrik Schumacher. Zaha Hadid – Recent Projects, A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo 2010 Neil Leach, Swarm Urbanism. Architectural Design. Wiley. 2009.

Neil Leach. Architectural Design. Wiley. 2009.

Why I Blog This: The article written about above is quite close to hitting the nail on the head in terms of where my research is heading, however, instead of being a literal derivative, the author’s approach leads them more in the direction of urban design, whereas my personal area of study is at a smaller scale, identifying form and programme from social data.

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4-2.10 2011/06/18 MVRDV and Social Data “Moreover, to the extent that MVRDV approaches architecture not as a conventional expression of aesthetics, materials and form but as an almost scientific investigation into the social and economic forces that influence our constructions, the datascapes were also a dry run for the firm’s own built work.”

It is in this statement, one that effectively sums up MVRDV’s work, and placed towards the end of an extensive article on the practice at the NY Times, that also serves as an abstract idea for my own study, “of turning abstract information into concrete form.”

MVRDV go about their project in similar ways each time, gathering up incredible amounts of

data, such as the buildings regs and other constraints. “Architects often view these rules and regulations as bureaucratic foils to their creativity.” In some projects, such as the mixed housing unit in the Amsterdam Docklands, the housing is arranged in such a manner as to promote new neighbourhood relationships.

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In a quote taken from the article, ““We try to avoid any sort of aesthetic aspect in our designs,” van Rijs told me. “Unlike Gehry, Zaha and others whose work is easy to recognize, we don’t have a strong personal style. Our methodology is based more on logic. Sometimes we call it an iron logic: depending on the situation, we come and take a look and say: ‘What’s happening? What should be done?’ Then we follow a step-by-step narrative, and when you see the building, you get the final result. It’s the only possible outcome. You cannot see anything else.” It is explained that MVRDV operate outside of any form-based architecture, relying on the logical arrangement of Data. “Some MVRDV designs are so logical they seem to turn reality on its head.”

Each of their projects shows a unique interpretation of the social data gathered, relating to their own keyed programmes. “VPRO’s endless interiors signaling the need for social connection; WoZoCos’s hanging boxes showing how to preserve our green spaces; the festively striped Silodam offering ways to mix rich and poor.”

It is in this article, a fairly indepth interview with Maas and coverage of the majority of their works, including their books Farmax, KM3 and Metacity/Datatown, and including quotes from the related book Reading MVRDV. Also, it is shown that there is a large amount of design that can arise from the analysis of social data, presenting an alternative to the environmental and structural based optimisation that most often arises in parametric based design methods.

Why I Blog This: this article, while a fairly standard analysis of the work MVRDV has undertaken, it presents an opportunity to further clarify my study area. In particular it is the social aspects of parametric design, often covered more in the fields of urban design, that is my main focus as opposed to structural analysis that is more deeply covered in literature and studies.

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4-2-11 2011/06/20 The Rise of Parametricism Patrik Schumacher – The Parametric City (accessed at http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/ The%20Parametric%20City.html) but available in print at Zaha Hadid – Recent Projects, A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo 2010 In the essay, Patrik discusses the changes currently underway in the way we perceive our built environment and the stagnating situation many cities have created with their “power of wealth creation to the point where it becomes its own barrier” He discusses the fall of ‘Fordism’ and the rise of, aptly name Post-Fordism’ as “variation,

flexible specialization, and networking. Accordingly Modernist urbanism (zoning) and Modernist architecture (serial monotony) experienced a fatal crisis.” Continuing, he discusses the prospect of analysing and projecting the cities situation in much the same way that meteorologists assess the climate – utilising generative processes and selection criteria to establish the city as a rulebased entity, one that can be extrapolated. He goes on to state that, although Postmodernism and Deconstructivism were on the correct path, it is a new ideal that will succeed, “a new powerful paradigm and style that promises to guide a new long wave of design research and innovation: Parametricism.”

He later goes on to state that, “The premise of Parametricism is that all urban and architectural elements must be parametrically malleable. Instead of assembling rigid and hermetic geometric

He later explains the complex ecological analysis undertaken: “morphological output variables can be programmed to respond to environmental input parameters. For instance, a data-set like a sun exposure map that maps the radiation-intensities a facade is exposed to during a given time period can become the data-input for the adaptive modulation of a sun-shading system.” He additionally gives credit to the organic form of the building functioning as signifier at an urban level: “this adaptive modulation gives the building an organic aesthetic that also makes the orientation of the building in the environment legible and thus facilitates the comprehension and navigation of the urban environment.”

However, with an increasing desire to adhere to progressively more stringent environment constraints, the apparent usage of high levels of steel and concrete within Hadid’s complex forms seem unnecessary and impractical, despite its optimisation, where a crafted environmental adherent and socially optimised form would be of equally beneficial- economically, environmentally and socially.

A balanced is present here, the ideals of Schumacher’s Parametric utopia are at present still

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figures – like all previous architectural styles - Parametricism brings malleable components into a dynamical play of mutual responsiveness as well as contextual adaptation.” While the concept of “everything is potentially made to network and resonate with everything else,” is admirable, and arguably is being done, I fail to see why parametricism, once applied at the urban and social level, need also be used at the structural and form level as well. The expression of the use of parameters is evident, but is it required?

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distant, and Schumacher’s “spaceship planet Earth” is currently undergoing a shift in built environment towards this goal. Within this gap however, there remains present areas of utilising social data and optimisation to craft a city, as well as opportunity to use these goals at a more economical, if less optimised, level.

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4-2.12 2011/06/21 Critical Dependancies and Interrelationships Inspired by a post on BLDG BLOG “Discontinuous, Contingent, and Nontraditionally Vulnerable,” the article covers a recent uncovering of the US’s ‘critical dependancies,’ or international sites of great import, whether it be oil, information, food etc. A map has since been produced by Domus, the publishers of the article (reproduced here)

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This post, together with other surveys and collections of geographic and social interrelations present a unique look at the topography of our world, beyond the apparent visual world we take for granted. It is in this realm of diagrams, of patterns and lines, that I believe it is possible to explore by applying parameters to said data and exploring the architectural outcomes that could possibly emerge.

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As an extension of the thinking so far, is it possible that the social data being uncovered here, and elsewhere, can be analysing and applied via parameters in much the same way that structural and environmental data is being applied to create optimised form â&#x20AC;&#x201C; producing a socially optimised and integrated building?

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Why I Blog This: the map above is a strong summation of thoughts so far â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a visual correlation of social and geographic dependancies that I believe it is possible to apply parameters to to uncover new and progressive architectural outcomes.

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4-2.13 2011/06/24 Grasshopper

Been working recently on getting to know the Grasshopper plugin for Rhino. The above is pretty much as far as I’ve managed to get thus far – the script generates and controls a grid of cylinders relating to their proximity to a curve (radius) and a point on said curve (height).

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Why I Blog This: It is easy to see the power and capabilites of the Grasshopper program, as a manipulator of space/diagrams relating to a series of parametric inputs. The thoughts here is if Social Data can be manipulated in such a similar matter, with parameters such as occupancy, size, dependencies, for example, and how they could potentially interelate to create adaptable spaces.

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4-2.14 2011/06/28 Reading Schumacher and Parametric Definitions

(Fortunately for someone living in a remote area, Patrik Schumacher’s tendency to upload all his essays and texts to his official website is a godsend; all quotes from here are taken from essays within that site) In his essay Parametric Patterns, Schumacher proposes a “distinction

between organization and articulation as the two central dimensions of the task of architectural design.”

He goes on to define the terms in greater detail: “The aspect of construction has been largely outsourced to the disciplines of building engineering.

Organisation is concerned with the spatialization of the social order via objective distances/ proximities and via physical divisions/connections between domains. Articulation is concerned with the subjective comprehension of the spatialized social order. Articulation cannot be dispensed with.

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It involves the central core competency of architecture. Articulation contains the differentia specifica that demarcates architecture/design from all engineering disciplines. Articulation reckons with the fact that buildings function only via the user’s active “reading” of the buildings’ spatial organization.

What things look like matters! At a certain level of social complexity adequate spatial organizations can only become effective if their ordering operations can enlist the user’s capacity to actively “read” the urban/architectural environment. Only on the basis of articulate organizations will users be enabled to navigate, and collectively utilize the built environment to its fullest potential. The reference problem for the task of articulation is orientation. Articulation should facilitate orientation by making the spatial organization, and the social order within it, legible. Orientation also implies the steering of expectations about the social scenarios that might unfold within a space and about the conduct that is appropriate within the space.”

He later progresses to express the Form vs Function and its distinction from Articulation and Organisation. He states that articulation, in its infancy, (quoting Germain Boffrand) took cues from theatre and set design, especially in the ways that the structures, in each aspect of their being, project their function to the observer. Claiming that we judge some places to need be serious/ sad (mausoleums) or light/happy (music rooms), and that nature makes us susceptible to these impulses. Following this history, he expresses his interpretation of the current state of this spatial atmosphere: “Decoration, expressing the appropriate character of a space, was linked to propriety within a sophisticated system of social distinctions. Today spaces seem more neutral, encounters are less ritualized and decorum seems less conspicuous. But have these registers of social coding disappeared altogether?”

Discussing the progression from historical decoration, through abandonment in early modernism (mentioned above), and into a modern resurgence in deconstructionism and it’s successor, first

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faceted folding, and later NURBs folded forms, and applications of texture mapping, Schumacher comes to a conclusion of scripting and its form applications as the modern outcome of articulation of space, a parametric pattern. He objects additionally to the usage of pattern applications in an arbritrary sense, explaining “the differentiation of the surface should serve as medium of articulation. It can do this only if it is correlated with the geometric or functional aspects of the space the surface constructs.” Some examples given of these techniques are presented: “relief, seaming, material, texture, colour, reflectivity, translucency.”

It follows throughout this article, of an underlying trend to utilise parametric design to articulate an organisation via differentiation, and application of form. However, little attention is given to the generation of the organisation that is depicted in by the articulation. It leadsto a conclusion that there is potential study to be had in the parametric design of the organisation side of the design, opposed to the articulation covered by Schumacher in this article.

In a separate essay, Parametric Diagrammes, Schumacher opens with a discussion of two types of diagrams- ordinary and extra-ordinary. Versus the ordinary, pre-determined outcomes diagrams, the “Deleuzian (extra-ordinary) diagramme is an abstract machine that is valued precisely because its downstream implications are totally open. The crucial difference between ordinary and extraordinary diagrammes does not reside within the graphic or digital object itself, but in the patterns of its use.” It is in these diagrams that parametric design and my research will be leading.

Later he opens up a second distinction: metric versus parametric, identifying the ordinary-

extraordinary as concerning ”the external embedding of the diagramme within the rationality of an encompassing design process, the distinction between metric and parametric diagrammes concerns the internal constitution of the diagramme.” He further expands on the two, identifying an orthogonal interrelationship, giving some examples of each:

Schumacher later begins discussing a Parametric Paradigm, and the onset of a new era of Architectural style, one of mass-customisation.

Why I Blog This: It is in these two essays that important definitions and distinctions (ordinary vs

extraordinary, metric vs parametric, articulation vs organistion) are set out for the parametric style and tools. Identifying where my research is likely to sit, at least roughly, is useful in pinning down the exact subject of the study.

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“Durand’s diagrammes as well as the diagrammes of modernism since 1925 are ordinary metric diagrammes. The abstract art of the 20th Century, as well as the diagrammes of deconstructivism and the “abstract machines” of early folding were extraordinary metric diagrammes. Since the midnineties parametric diagrammes started to emerge, first in the form of animations. These were extraordinary parametric diagrammes within open-ended design research explorations. Today most of us have switched to work with ordinary parametric diagrammes, i.e. we know in advance what we are aiming for.”

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4-2.15 2011/07/02 City Sense: Real-Time Data Shaping Cities

Taken from the City-Sense competition website.

The entry summary reads as follows: “The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and HP are pleased to announce the 4th Advanced Architecture Contest, on the theme of CITY-SENSE: Shaping our environment with realtime data.

The aim of the competition is to promote discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.

The competition is open to architects, engineers, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing a proposal capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information technology, architecture, and urban planning, with the purpose of balancing the impact real-time data collection might have on sensor-driven cities.”

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Besides this statement, little on the website gives indication as to the content or direction of submissions, but a number of websites are linked to the page, mostly tending towards selfsufficient architectures and sensor systems.

Why I Blog This: A quick update I stumbled upon today and didn’t want to forget, this website gives acknowledgment of professional and academic interest in data-driven designs and research, as well as tips and hints as to where to expand my range- for example sensor systems.

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4-2.16 2011/07/17 City Systems and Customisable Musings

It’s been quite a while since I updated my work here, during which time I went on vacation to Barcelona and managed to not really think about research for a week or two. Experiencing travel in cities like Barcelona is a rare occasion for me, used to the countryside and rather old-fashioned transport systems.

In those situations I’m used to – over land rail and bus networks, the travel occurs in the visual dimension of the city – all the regions I travel through I experience spatially and can usually place myself fairly convincingly in an overall map when travelling in this way. By comparison, the metro system of Barcelona, and increasing numbers of cities worldwide, is underground, and located in a dimension outside of the typical spatial plane of the city. The result of such distance is a city plan where the city is experienced through proximities – to the nearest metro, local amenities within each metro’s ‘catchment area.’ The result is a city that is optimised to quick travel, where one travels to where their desired service is located, and each service can be collected in its own groups, whereas in slower overland systems, clusters of general services can be clustered in residential areas.

(For the record, I stayed just south of El Putxet, and my map was oriented differently, giving me a radically different mental picture of the city).

Why I Blog This: This post is relatively off from my usual theme, and part of that is to get my head working again before I delve into more relevant topics. However, the idea of experiencing the city in little compartmentalised areas is an interesting idea – could architecture and buildings be able to express their uses in blocks, such that users know where they are needed and want to go,

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Barcelona Metro

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without intruding on other circles of programme entirely?

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On the other hand, systems like transport, and waste maps, are highly stylised and as the reality of their placement is not often considered, would it be possible to dream a world where certain systems are responsive to the needs of the social circles taking place above it. Would it be possible to parametrically design a transport, or waste, or electricity, system that, in real-time, responded to the needs of the social programmes experienced â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;aboveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;?

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4-2.17 2011/07/26 Navigating the Slow Down

It’s been over a week since my last post, and while in part I blame this for the wall of distraction during my vacation, I also hold in blame the potential drying up of interest and new invigorating research in this area.

It’s time to try a new angle.

This post is more a hold-over to ensure I don’t forget my own topic while I’m away for a couple of days, but where once I was obsessed with parametric data usage to create new visualisations, I took for granted that which I was intending to use it on. This realisation has generated a new path of research which will feed into the currently desired zone of outcome smoothly. The area in question is the development of open-plan and flexible spaces to create truly adaptable and modifiable areas, potentially zoning and areas and flexibility that are controlled or just inspired by data collected from the programme and potential users.

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Imagine a space such as that pictured above, but with flexible partitions, whether tangible or more intangible barriers, that are responsive and adaptable to the data sets used and the needs of the users in questions.

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4-2.18 2011/08/20 An Overview of Flexible Archetypes

To instigate a new path in the progression of my research, I began with an overview of my new ideal outcome: Flexible architecture, or in the words of Toyo Ito, “the search for a fluid architecture that only becomes complete once people inhabit and use the building.”

The book opens with an overview of the history of flexible architecture throughout history, of which some keys concepts and ideals held true when applied through my path of progression: “Habraken (1960) proposed that buildings should consist of serviced frameworks to which rooms and spaces could be added in a form directly influenced by experience and practice” (58) “It is about allowing future users and designers, who will know their own situation best, the leeway to make appropriate decisions when they are needed” (110) “the ambition should be to create buildings that have integrated, carefully devised systems that are capable of responding to new and varied situations” (110) My aim in this regard is to create a parametric data-fed system, or systems, that actively respond to needs and programmes, capable of being modified and updated at will. It is about finding the 4th dimension in Architecture through the use of social data.

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The author also outlines four main types of flexible architecture, which are discussed individually throughout part 2 of the book, these are:

• • • •

Adapt: a loose fit and open building Move: relocatable Transform: physical structure alteration Interact: responds to requirements in automatic ways (sensors)

In the course of my research into data and parametric systems, my path leads me to find the interaction aspect the most appealing, while the moving aspect of flexibility sits outside of the chosen route and has thus been excluded from this discussion.

Adapt Adaptable architecture is identified as being a loosely structural building, where most of the interior and usable elements are left open and free form, allowing the user to incorporate themselves into the fine-tuning of the building. The framework meanwhile, “is an important element in allowing that change to happen” (115) and must be considered as the groundwork to the building, which has “fewer restrictions fixed in place by the shell designer.” (116) What this leads to, then, “is a process of collaboration between a range of participants” (116) to create the final usable building.

Also identified through the use of examples is the creation of “recognisable interfaces where the change can occur with minimum disruption to the level above” (118). This is compounded in

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the mention that “multi-use spaces, if they are to work effectively in their different functions, are complex design problems” (119). This is a complex process to achieve a fully adaptable building, one that is complex enough to cater for the functionality required, but also be undisruptive to other elements, leading to a key design problem with the style: “it cannot provide a close fit to the functions that it must support” (127).

The servicing requirement of adaptable buildings is a key consideration as they “tend to have a higher servicing element than fixed-use solutions, and so can be more expensive when first constructed.” (142).

Seattle Public Library, by Rem Koolhaas/OMA

Transform “Moving walls, floors and roofs can also significantly change the shape of the building so that different activities can take place… a series of small meeting rooms can become a single large conference area” (152)

Transformation, the second discussed flexible ‘archetype’ discusses the possibility of a building to change it’s built form when needed by converting traditionally static elements to become something more, something more present. There are many given reasons for this, for example “the building may need to establish different identities when it is open and when it is closed to the

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A given example of Adaptable architecture is provided in Rem Koolhaas/OMA’s Seattle Public Library (2004), pictured above. It manages to change the library type of bland open-plan information store to a “series of spatial compartments, each dedicated to a specific role.” (128) Each floor was given its own character, and purpose, while “the spaces between the floors became interfaces where a variety of work, relaxation, and entertainment functions could operate and trade off the interaction between the activities on either side.” (128).

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public, or it may need to change its image depending on the nature of the activity that is taking place inside.” (160).

Galleria Mall West, by UN Studio

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However, it is also suggested through examples, such as Galleria Mall West, by UN Studio (pictured); and Allianz Arena, by Herzog & de Meuron, that “highly significant visual transformation can also take place without physical movement… (possibilities) have been accelerated by new mass communication devices such as LED screens.” (162) Whether achieved through physical or visual transformation, this type of architecture works “by creating an environment or an object that is not static… it brings kinetic life to what is normally considered an inanimate art” (171) Interact The final type of flexible architecture I will discuss here is interaction, or as described within the book (it’s second form) “as intelligent automation, the key difference being that is has a built-in, reactive quality” (209) The discussion leads onto how such a system works, through the use of a sensor and actuator at the system’s most basic: “it is architecture that is receptive to people’s needs to alter their environment and has mechanisms in place to do this easily”. (210) In the future, the development route of interactive architecture, and its automative qualities lead to the development of “predictive technology to improve efficiency and accuracy” (213). This is where I aim to collide and develop my lines of research: using database systems of collected social data and usage patterns to establish parametric and predictively adaptive buildings capable of more effectively utilising space according to needs.

An initial idea, at its most raw, is a database that collates the work calendars of staff of an office or building and is able to take a preset number and arrangements of these programmes and adapt its rooms and spaces to accommodate each period of work.

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Why I Blog This: This post, and by extension, the book it is derived, leads the way into a series of posts that are going to explore the concept of flexibility in architecture and how various inputs can create outcomes that are active and transcend the static nature of traditional architecture.

In particular over the course of this book the nature of interactivity and sensors in architecture grabbed my attention, and I believe a discourse exists between the routes of interactive architecture and social databases in the realm of predictive parametric architecture.

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4-2.19 2011/08/25 Exploring 4D Interactive Architecture and Its Implications

“The interactivity incorporated within the physical nature of buildings means working at a new level of architectural complexity. But the greatest challenge of all is not scientifical, nor technological. And neither is it even functional. No, the true challenge is, as always, of an aesthetic nature.” (25)

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Pixel City, by Robert Cohen/Archigram And thus is revealed the case for this project, from Interactivity a the centre of Avant-Garde Architectural Research by Antonio Saggio. How can an interactive, data led system create an aesthetic impact on the built form. Already designers are investigating ways and means of creating this technology and incorporating it into installations via sound, light and other touch based methods. But thus far there seems to be a dearth of concrete architectural forms that utilise this area in a proper manner. Potentially the danger lies with a point raised by Walter Aprile and Stefano Mirte in Building as Interface, “to overload it (technology) with aesthetics breaks its back” (35). I also believe this to work the opposite way, to overload aesthetics with tech is too much, there needs to be a subtlety, a careful touch that brings both worlds together in a new and innovative manner.

This is at the core of my decision to incorporate real-time data led adaptivity into this discussion, for, in the words of Cedric Price, “what if a building or space could be constantly generated and regenerated?” We are in a period of technological flux, where our knowledge is increasing at an increasingly rapid pace, such that to design cutting edge means to be outdated by completion.

Ole Bouman in Architecture, Liquid, Gas imagines exploring “time-based rather than locationbased technologies” (14) is the way forward, “it is not enough for architecture to think about the temporisation of space; it must face the spatialisation of time.” (15) This is a view held throughout many articles in the book, exploring the concept of what architecture means to be in a social environment that is becoming more and more interactive. “The reality

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Tokyo Guggenheim, by Zaha Hadid Architects

This is the realm of architects whose “chosen domain of activity seek to constitute a new threshold between the virtual and the physical” (5).

All quotes taken from 4D Space: Interactive Architecture, edited by Lucy Bullivant, or articles within.

Further research: Timeline of Interactive Architecture Projects Why I Blog This: This concept of interactive, digital architecture presents many ideas and thoughts relating to the incorporation of digital data into this system, especially in the realm of real-time emergent systems and spaces. For example, what if a sensor was able to track the

movements and number of users of a space, and potentially other factors in addition, and be able to analyse and feed this changing data into a parametric database that adapts the room, its use and time-based schedules around a particular user base?

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that a formally physical workplace is now redundant” (38) needs to be faced, states editor Lucy Bullivant in Intelligent Workspaces: Crossing the Thresholds. This is commonly treated as being the involvement of time as a fourth dimension to architectural consideration often idealised as put into practice “via distributed intelligence and active material systems, living space that changes internal parameters and performance in direct response to inhabitants lives and external events” (7).

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4-2.20 2011/08/26 Organicities - Relocating My Startpoint

All information taken, with respect, from the Organicities Project website.

Our investigations will take place over two semesters, instrumentalizing digital media and computational methodologies to: • - analyze the existing forces affecting the site for potential patterns of adaptive growth; • - simulate campus development over time and with the capacity to respond to anticipated and unanticipated future scenarios; • - design integrated landscape and building forms that address the simultaneous needs for environmental performance and typological invention.

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This ideal surmises the goals aimed for in my own research, collecting and analysing data with a goal to allow for real-time change and flexibility to unknown futures. Likewise their hypothesis is a very interesting take on my own endpoint: Conventional master plans which propose either a single static ‘end’ condition, or several landmark phases en route to a fixed solution are incapable of responding to changes in the factors which regulate development over time. Frozen in an outmoded context, such strategies deliver ineffective planning in the short-term and require extensive recapitulation in the long-term.

By examining existing environmental forces computationally and employing bottom-up design strategies, the studio proposals will achieve performative characteristics that are independent of the global system’s scale and extents. Using this performance as feedback and employing mechanisms for adaptive growth, the studio will generate dynamic and robust systems informed by mutable circumstances and yet continue to be effective.

The major differences present between our two projects is the focus that Organicities seemingly presents towards environmental data, whereas in my own studies I intend to try and aim my focus more towards social patterns and data. This does not mean our goals are mutually exclusive, rather the ways to the end are what is important, as ever, and here they portray a similar approach to my own mental musings.

The website continues, stating many important points, that while not necessarily important to the process of collecting the data, gives effective words as to the presentation of the outcome:

Excellence in statistical graphics consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. Graphical displays should: • show the data • induce the viewer to think about the substance rather than about methodology, graphic design, the technology of graphic production, or something else

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• avoid distorting what the data have to say • present many numbers in a small space • make large data sets coherent • encourage the eye to compare different pieces of data • reveal the data at several levels of detail, from a broad overview to the fine structure • serve a reasonably clear pupose: description, exploration, tabulation, or decoration • be closely integrated with the statistical and verbal descriptions of a data set Graphics reveal data.

The website continues, exploring, briefly, what is meant by the term parametric, and what parametric design methods really create. “This potential to create spatial configurations without prior determination of their physical qualities affords just enough dissociation from authorial will that a unique invention can be created.”

In essence, as I read it, Parametric design enables data to be analysed in a way that allows the data constraints to be interrelated with programmatical constraints in such a way that an adaptable and emergent form can be created.

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Rahm Meteorological Architecture, courtesy of EFRL

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Huang et al., Slash. Courtesy of EFPL Treading the fine path of deriving entirely my thoughts from this project, I shall end on a quote mentioned on the site. Venturi, (14) in Complexity and contradiction in architecture, as a warning of parametric, and other computational, ends in architecture states:

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“The limitations of the platitudinous architects who invoke integrity, technology, or electronic programming as ends in architecture… suppress those complexities and contradictions inherent in art and experience.”

Why I Blog This: The usage of a recent project and website amidst the wave of recent flexible architecture posts has allowed me to reground myself in the roots of this project and what my research really should be about. This project really sums up many of the goals I intend to explore in my study, only with a slightly different endgame. It is also a warning to my own design work to not get so swallowed in the deluge of data that I can’t see the end form for the forest of information I am lost in.

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4-2.21 2011/08/26 The Adaptable Home, Or Change, Before and After Occupancy A book, that while outdated now (it was first published in 1952), Avi Friedman’s The Adaptable House offers a couple of insights into fairly wide ranging thoughts on adaptability: “Changes to volumes could also require alteration of the building envelope which, as a result, could change its appearance.” (17) “Propose a room that can accommodate multiple uses.” (17) “Try to avoid partitions that enclose and define functions and activities.” (127) “Changing utility conduits throughout the house is a possible yet costly, labour intensive, and time consuming task.” (169) Obviously these statements are fairly generic, but set out a basic, but essentially, series of rules that define adaptability and flexibility – the need to design without a set goal in mind, to allow change and chaos to affect the design outside of your decisions. As he states, “in the early part of the twentieth century, traditional home design created, defined and enclosed space for each use.”

(127) Needless to say, this viewpoint has changed drastically over the recent years, with open plan and multifunctional spaces become more and more dominant within both domestic and larger scale architectures.

This point is interesting as it foreshadows another project I have already discussed, in Negotiate My Boundary, which takes this idea even further, allowing residents to shape the very envelope and neighbourhood interaction diagrams themselves via the digital realm. A natural progression where data becomes more and more intrinsic as computing and internet connectivity became more and more common.

Why I Blog This: This book is interesting in its wide ranging points it makes, as well as the

comparison to NMB, however, the key point to take from this in the development of the research is the distinction between adaptable and flexible/interactive housing and its relationship to the digitaldata world.

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An interesting comparison to make here is his discussion of preoccupancy choices, the “design of a project characterised by open zones within a general support structure to accommodate occupant-chosen layouts of various types, sizes and materials.” (39) This “detailed information was distributed to all participants” (39) at the construction stage during meetings held by clients, builders and the architects. The aim here was to allow the future occupants to have a say into the layout of their own homes, while the macro-scale design was controlled still by the designer.

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4.2-22 2011/08/28 Flexible Housing, and a Manual of Use Flexible Housing by Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till continues the revelations uncovered in The Adaptable House, as its goals focus more on the generic building, one that can adapt to any use, rather than be optimised through data to predict future changes, as ideally will be covered throughout this study. The problem here is the means to the end, for the end is much the same in both situations, avoiding such exclamations as “why, just why, would one build housing that so quickly becomes redundant?” (4) However, the book does aid the categorising of adaptability and flexibility through the use of well researched definitions of both words in this context, briefly: “Where adaptability is based around issues of use, flexibility involves issues of form and technique.” (5) A longer quote on the side of each definition is provided below:

“Adaptability thus covers ‘polyvalence’ the term employed in particular by Dutch architects and theorists to describe spaces that can be used in a variety of ways, generally without making physical changes.” (5) The reference to Dutch architects in particular is of note here regarding my previous reading of the work of both MVRDV and OMA, both influential in the realm of data based architectures.

“Flexibility… is achieved by altering the physical fabric of the building: by joining together rooms or units, by extending them, or through sliding or folding walls and furniture.” (5)

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This is more the goal of the second aspect of the study: using data and real-time analysis to predict and react to changes in usage patterns and utilise flexible methods to respond in optimised ways.

Later in the book, in a manual of flexible housing, the authors give both Movable & Sliding Walls and Divisible Rooms low cost rating when compared to a relatively high cost benefit and priority when considering adaptability in housing (191). This corresponds to the ideal of using these methods to adapt a building to a calculated usage pattern. However, one crucial point to raise when considering the incorporation of flexibility is “for rooms to be divisible, the number and locations of windows is crucial.” (191) Further reading: Architecture of Movement, Patrik Schumacher Why I Blog This: This book, while not relating in detail to my topic, provides well research definitions to both flexible and adaptable housing, as well as providing a later section (the Manual of Flexible Housing) that could be invaluable to later considerations of installing data led systems into buildings.

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4-2.23 2011/09/05 Thoughts on Study Organisation As a continuation of a thought process last night before sleep, this post will outline briefly the different aspects and potential topics and approaches that can be tackled and discussed throughout the written study: Opening/Introduction: What is data in design? How has it been used previously? What can be the outcome of such an approach and why is it used?

Data as influencing the programme: This section is based fairly heavily on the work of MVRDV, OMA, and partially on the work of RAMTV (though their study bridges the divide somewhat). This is the realm of the datascape, where the collection of large, vast sums of data is analysed on an urban and typological level, to influence exactly what is needed by the building, and whether previous attempts and patterns within the urban datascape can be incorporated into the design brief at this level to influence the cityscape and fabric of the built environment at a macro level, and the individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s optimisation of use and needs at a micro state.

Data as enabler of the programme: This topic delves deeper into the more 4D aspects of data, and whether it is possible to utilise data collected through sensors and surveys/inputs to alter and create a responsive environment that can react and be pro-active to a comfortable, optimised environment. It is the realm of the live optimisation, and is present in the micro level of RAMTVâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thesis, and fairly widespread among small scale installation builders and interactive architecture, though level prevalent at a large, urban scale.

Potential Self-Initiated Studies: A case study report of data collection on a personal project level, using the research collected throughout the previous two sections, investigating the potential feasibility of this approach in architecture and design. blog archive - research & development :APPENDICES 4-2

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4-2.24 2011/09/05 Virtual Architecture and Applications of Datascapes

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Asymptote Architecture, a practice whose members, Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture published this book (Flux), identifies itself as straddling the line between virtual and physical architectures. They identify this virtual architecture as “an evolving discipline that results from the convergence of data-mapping and simulation, digital form making, information “architecture” and virtual reality constructs and theory.” (51) Interestingly, this focus on more than mapping data, but analysing and applying it to simulation and form relates to the notion of a datascape, which they themselves discuss, “rendering the information in navigable three-dimensional entities provided a rich domain for conveying the relationships between different data sets.” (45) Normally the datascapes they modelled for Understanding USA would be online and 3D-viewable, but the website is unfortunately down.

Understanding USA Datascape, unfortunately these ‘scopes get a little too bogged down in the aesthetics and the data shown and manipulated is hard to understand.

Also of note, the authors mention a distinction between virtual architecture (“The assumption is that spatial, informational, and temporal circumstances provoke experiences and create assemblies that are tangible and plastic” [51]), virtual building, which they liken to renderings of conceptual buildings, renderings they later criticise as being a close ended view on digital technology: “choosing instead to view technology as only a means to the further entrenchment of architectural representation as “perfect illusion”” (52).

Some projects mentioned throughout the book include Campo Marzi of Piranesi, which they argue was among the instigators of this virtual thinking, saying it “can be reinterpreted as a data environment in which the buildings and architectures he envisioned each represent an idealised accumulation of “architectonic” information” (51). Also mentioned in notes was Koolhaas’s LA

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Media Centre.

One of their own projects discussed in the book is the New York Stock Exchange Command centre and Virtual Trading Floor. They argue “the architecture was influenced less by physical surroundings than by an attempt to spatialise the movement of bodies and the flow of data and information” (23). In practice this amounted to the “curvature of the glass… double curved work surface, embedded message boards… create a seemingly seamless and smooth space” (23), of the physical command centre, and was “conceived as a physical analogue to the movement and continuous flow of data and information throughout the space of the NYSE” (23).

The other aspect, the virtual trading floor “posed an interesting opportunity to reconsider the “reality” of the actual trading floor,” (37) and that “one had to consider how to navigate through a realm of data” (35). The final product functioned as a floor that investigated the spatial aspect of data, and how movement and place affects memory and cognition of the event. Meanwhile, a larger question was posed at the closing of the coverage: “The fact that the general public will soon be able to navigate a virtual trading floor… is unprecedented and begs the question, What actually constitutes an architectural experience and presence?” (37) To close, another of the projects, for a Kyoto Research Park, notes the following intriguing idea:

“computer systems count the users occupying the building at any given moment, processing and managing data that is transferred to the glass panels to control colour density and hue” (131). Some parallels are clearly apparent here with the data led flexible architecture mentioned in previous posts, while my opinion gives that this usage of counting and manipulating glass is a purely graphical touch for aesthetic purposes, it does argue the case that more intriguing spatial configuration based patterns could come into practice with calculating and analytical sensors and actuators. blog archive - research & development :APPENDICES 4-2

Why I Blog This: The book, while straying too close to the purely virtual architecture most of the time, presents interesting views on the concept of what is a virtual architecture, and what computers mean to the profession, while compounding previous thoughts on datascapes and sensor-based architecture with examples and musings spaced throughout.

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4-2.25 2011/09/06 Hybrid Architectures and Data Diagrams

The next book in my reading, Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture opens with a fairly long quote as a summation of its contents: “Employing software routines that track time-related factors, such as pedestrian and automotive movement, environmental elements such as wind and sun, urban conditions such as views or site density, these designers are producing buildings in which virtual and real media technologies are inextricably linked.” (15) However, for much of the following depictions of practices, including Greg Lynn, Morphosis and NOX, the work shown quite often tends towards the previously defined virtual building rather than virtual architecture. Not to speak against the credibility of their work, but their focus mainly lay within the realms of utilising computational form-finding in a rather literal sense. A lot of the work shown included complex curve forms and other structures that could only be formed within a digital environment.

On the other hand, a couple of projects towards the end of the book presented interesting takes on the usage of data as previously discussed on this blog. The first of these, a loose collection of architects under the name OCEAN presented an installation called Chamberworks, undertaken by OCEAN NO. Their working methologies included:

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“The particles, which might describe lines of human movement within the gallery, were then animated.

The resulting sequence of changing densities and formulations was analysed and diagrams for the construction, lighting scheme and circulation patterns were deduced.” (158)

Chamberworks Installation

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On a more top-level discussion of their work, OCEAN describes their technique as “rather than resorting to the usual piecemeal systems of urban assemblage and bricolage, OCEAN mines the potential of a volatile and pliant urbanism and architecture for solutions” (160), and “the collaborative asserts that recent advances in digital space-modelling scripting software will shift urban organi-zational principles from figure and field towards a vectorial logic of magnitude, trajectory and intensity” (153). This point in particular is intriguing as it suggests a revaluation of the understanding of the cityscape, away from something static more towards, as I read it, something more fluid, a projection of a conglomeration of past and present states or of typologies to read the city as a state in flux.

“New computational techniques make it possible to lay bare the multiplicitious layering of experiences and activate this knowledge in new ways. When mapping movement patterns, the time-program relationship is not compartmentalised but is a reflection of synchronic continuous time. Infrastructural layers may be classified, calculated and tested individually, then interwoven to achieve both effective flux and effective interaction. In this way temporal conditions are connected to programmatic themes in a simulation of the non-segmented manner in which time flows in a real situation.” (166) Thus say Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UN Studio, the other practice of note in this topic within the book. The project discussed here is the Transport Interchange in Arnhem, where the studio used interweaving diagrams to illustrate patterns of movement. “Paying particular attention to issues of circulation and egress, van Berkel and Bos based the plan on careful examination of traffic flows in and around the station” (168).

In other discussions about their design, the architects mention “coagulations of passengers

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Transport Interchange, Arnhem

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at points where traffic systems converge suggested where cuts should be made in the roof to allow in lightâ&#x20AC;? (168). This method of design, where gathered data becomes visual, vectorial and diagrammatical, influences the final form of the building moreso than any formal visual ideal, is the inspiration behind this entire study.

Why I Blog This:Â While a lot of the book is outside my defined boundaries of research, it allows

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comparison between previously described Virtual architectures and buildings. In addition, the two projects discussed in this post are effective in their discussion of methods, and both lie quite close on the spectrum to where the subject matter is most intriguing to me.

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4-2.26 2011/09/07 Drawbacks and the Role of Simulation

In his essay C<AMO>UFLAGE (here quoted from print in What is OMA), Neil Leach presents an interesting take on the work of AMO’s research, and of datascapes in general. In reference to work on the city of Lagos, quoted as being in a state of chaotic disrepair and likened to ‘hell on earth’, Leach comments that AMO writes “it is out of the complexity of Lagos (that) certain self-organising patterns start to emerge” (90). This statement, criticising the fact that over analysing this data will potentially result in patterns emerging where there should be nothing. It is possible to extract order from chaos if one squints at the madness long enough.

Not long after criticising Koolhaas’s writings as being potentially too analytical and aestheticised, Leach switches court to write his defence to the visualisation of data and design in the contemporary world, something altogether quite common in the positive views expressed in the book. He argues that while Koolhaas himself does not expressively discuss aesthetics in his work, “representation – the realm of aesthetics – has become the repressed discourse in Koolhaas’s works” (92). Indeed Leach continues his discussion, arguing that aesthetics has the potential to be an identifier to locate the individual in an increasingly generic world, where cities have become global as opposed to national.

In a quote I interpret to cover the realm of datascapes and manipulation of data, Leach states: “For it is not that reality has been lost beneath a world of simulation. Simulation itself has become the new realm of interaction.” (94)

Why I Blog This: This essay, although admittedly quite weighted in Koolhaas’s favour, does open with an interesting point on the drawbacks of datascape usages in analysis, while later discussion of aesthetics opens up a conversation as to the new nature of data in the world of architecture.

When looking at reality itself becomes too confusing.

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In a world that is getting more and more complicated and nuanced with interaction, is it not time to look to a new aesthetic to visualise the paths towards a new architecture?

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4-2.27 2011/09/09 Salted Datascapes

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Taken from this article on BLDGBLOG, here is the work of Designer/Cartographer Meg Studer and her maps on the Global Salt Trade, which presents an opportunity to put pictures to all this talk of collecting and visualising data, in what, in my opinion is an effective manner. The only further step from this is to undertake the analysis of the data to deduct a built form and programme from this datascape.

[Images: The global road salt trade, mapped by Meg Studer].

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4-2.28 2011/09/11 Why Data

It is after more reading of What is OMA?, and understanding how Rem Koolhaas approaches architecture, that it dawned that I haven’t really tackled: Why data? Why look at maps of interrelationships and study the city when other options are available?

“The aspect of method, the need for effective contact with interlocutors, is one thing. The representativeness of the chosen group is another: in effect, it is a matter of being able to assess what the people we see and speak to tell us about the people we do not see and speak to. The field ethnologist’s activity throughout is the activity of a social surveyor, a manipulator of scales, a low-level comparative language expert: he cobbles together a significant universe by exploring intermediate universes as needed, in rapid surveys; or by consulting relevant documents as a historian.” (11) This long quote, by anthropologist Marc Augé, taken from Non-Places, is an interesting idea of architect as ethnologist (applied to Koolhaas in Okwui Enwezor’s essay Terminal Modernity in What is OMA?) and expands the concept of architectural analysis to the society it is placed. In addition, the usage of data collection and ‘scaping allows the architect to produce a “significant universe” from wide ranging sources and areas and compare them in the same vision. Also raised

by Enwezor is the point that “cities are not inert data waiting to be dug up and analysed like archaeological ruins, they are living organisms of complex cellular and molecular composition” (116). This danger of analysing a snapshot is reminiscent of Augé’s quote, by taking a point and using it to represent the entirety is a dead-end route. By effectively extrapolating the data and producing effective datascapes, potentially incorporating parametric methods, one can encapsulate the complex beast that is the 21st century urban environment.

Stirling later poses that “at the logical horizon of this arc of development, though, are the dangerous shoals of the Smart House, the Smart Building, the Smart City” (175). This, he poses, is not the goal. He contends that society and the individual still desire control and understanding of their architecture, when a building does it for them, they will feel trapped within the shell of a giant organism. Here, again, the distinction previous made between virtual architectures and building become apparent. To utilise datascapes in such a way that control is taken from the individual and placed in the hand of the visionary, analytical architect, a Smart Building allows no concession for

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Another essay in the same book The Users Guide to OMA by Bruce Sterling, approaches the idea of data collection in Architecture from a slightly different view, by considering that the “actual building is a node, an information filter, a virtual factory” (168), it is possible to adjust the conception of what a building is, and what is represents, and redefine functions amid a society of increasing interconnectivity and relationships. Along a similar line, “don’t design an impressive showpiece for the ages, and then jam some operations inside of it. Try to grasp the inherent nature of the operations, and then design the structure to shelter them” (173). The idea is to redefine function and built form around a new conception of programme, what exactly does x need to achieve in modern society?

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whim and brutally adheres to the datascapes, the virtual blurs with the real like a virtual building render blurs with the reality of the built.

On the other hand, if ones considers the incorporation of parametric and responsive architectures in systems then “urban life could be improved if all these flows were far more closely monitored and adjusted in real-time… through ubiquitous, dependable sensors arranged in well-designed, study, reactive networks” (176).

It in this theory that I reorganise my ideas about what it is that a data led network can provide to flexible and reactive architecture. The datascape needs to create the programme for the building in line with its analysis of the urban environment, and provide a flexibility with uses and form in line with this path. On the other hand, by pushing ‘Smart’ intelligence in building in such a way that the person is smothered by the building’s fancy, then the control, and the focus is removed from the self, in a way that contrasts with the original aim of locating the self, the individual, the building, within the concept of the organism, the society, the built environment.

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Why I Blog This: This post represents the reading of the past couple of days, and marks the realisation that a definition and introduction of Why Data? needs to be present to locate the study, and its ideals with its further delvings. In addition, the later writing introduces the concept of the Self, and the dangers of lapsing into a realm purely for, and by, data.

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4-2.29 2011/10/05 The Regionmaker

Taken from MVRDV – The Regionmaker: RheinRuhrCity Presented as a ‘user’s manual’ for their analysis program, the Regionmaker, the book deals with understanding the conception of the program, as well as discussing it’s usage.

It opens with a discussion on the definition of a region in the 21st century, immediately nearing the role of data in “the closest we can get to understanding real or abstract regions is to attempt to find and generalise the essential components of the region” (33), something done through the acquisition and analysis of data. Typical of MVRDV’s work, the book deals with multiple scales, creating “issues concerning the hierarchy of data (individual objects, classes and categories” (39), and also “the higher the detail and complexity of these scale issues, used in a regional model, the greater the need for better data analysis devices, sensors, monitors, computer processors and memory banks” (39). However, the collection and analysis of this level of detailed data leads to a much more grounded basis for more accurate predictions and speculations – “[the] use of computers has allowed the establishment of ‘real’ and ‘optimum’ sets of regions… even future scenarios forecasted and simulated” (41).

Also typical of MVRDV, and other data- and information-led practices, the Regionmaker “absorbs and combines knowledge from different professions,” (109) something that is becoming more and more widespread, allowing the collection and comparison of specialisations in professional practices.

After the data collection, the region is finally defined through two images. First is the physical/ spatial region: one defined by climate, physical geography, infrastructure, and other tangible elements – a ‘hardware’ vision. Second is the societal system, of flows and processes, and incorporates non-physical dimensions: the behaviour/psychology of societies, activities of trade and economic performance – a ‘software’ view of the region. Both of these visions are joined by comparisons of “scale, connectivity, hierarchies and time” (113). Through the collection of data and computer visualisation, a parametric model of interrelationships can map these interactions simultaneously, breaking the traditional barrier between the walls of hardware and software, typically used together but affecting only their own sphere. This blurring is reflected in the practices statements that “parameters can be seen as spatial laws or social laws” (123).

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The Regionmaker itself, as a program, functions as a conglomeration of multiple tools: the Inframaker – for movement, traffic optimisation, and other prediction programs; the Housing Generator – for optimal housing and neighbourhood creation; the Light-Calculator – for optimising the need for natural light; and the Functionmixer, previously discussed on this blog – to create the best mix of functions. Finally, a piece of software called the Idealizer allows “ideologies to be parametrised” (103). As a whole, this program allows for the “development of ‘devices.’ Tools that can combine large scale issues with individualised input, that can combine analysis with proposals.” (107)

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These parameters are defined throughout the urban analysis as different views and components of the city, each area of the RhineRuhr is defined as a product of the Regionmaker’s categories.

For example, the lower RhineRuhr area is classed as an envelope, while the fact that a place used to mean the area around the lower Ruhr places it into the timeframe category. Various linkages are also expressed, for example the fact that parishes (unit-type) is linked (parameter) to districts (envelopes). (261) The parameters reappear within the actual program, as “a real region depends on many individual and integral decisions, therefore Regionmaker consists of various individual and interdependent sliders” (127). They argue, expanding their view of contemporary regions, that “it has become arguable that regions and regionalism can be parametrised, being composed out of series of determining factors or parameters” (131). These parameters, used in a computerised program allow for a much more reactive model, creating scenarios where “changes on the lowest scale, for instance life-style, have immediate effects on the whole world” (173). The example presented is proposing that all Germans become vegetarian, and the program predicting possible outcomes.

In addition, these parameters, after being organised into hierarchies of scale and categories, have been placed into flowcharts, “depicting possible linkages between parameters” (135). These data flowcharts represent the options available to designers and allow or data-led choices of the outcomes.

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On the reverse of this seemingly perfect collection of analysis data, “information is added on a need to know basis” (145), due to the enormous amount of data available to designers and urban thinkers. As such the Regionmaker is not perceived as a finished product, but one that will be expanded to reflect the changing interests of the designers. This also is shown in the programs modular approach to analysis, with different packages of data that can be loaded and analysed depending on needs.

To get usable information out of the program additionally, the designer needs clearly defined outcomes, the sliders control ‘preference’ weighting on different categories, for example Risk.

As such, the control of the Regionmaker “is not expressed directly, but indirectly, via a set of

parameters” (143). This outcome based approach leads to a less playful approach to analysis, one that relies on the data to alter society to the way one aims for rather than the emergent approach, whereupon the data is left deliberately aimless, with the intention that a form would present itself from information. However, “the formal approach give the obligation to provide precise definitions of existing and new design rules” (159).

Thus MVRDV do not present the Regionmaker as a tool to replace designers and thinkers, but instead their tool aims to assist educated urban professionals to perceive optimised methods to attain their built vision.

The book closes its manual role by undertaking an example “to explore the possibilities of the region” by setting out “four extreme scenarios… they may serve as a platform for discussion, comparing different possible futures.” (279). These are, by appearance within the book:

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The Regionmaker GUI Mass Unemployment, by proposing a scenario where a mass unemployment epidemic strikes the region, MVRDV explore the changes to the region if people emigrate to better areas for work, and describe the result as the deserted city deteriorating over time, to become overgrown and eventually develop into an attractive park region for tourists, significantly altering its current position in the worldview (281).

Campus, a scenario whereupon the data showing the decline of traditional industry and the rise of information based work within the region, MVRDV present a future where the region builds upon its historical focus in a research/learning role, focusing on clean, zero-impact technology to restore the region’s previous environmental damage, and becoming a city-by-city university campus-led region. (309) Network, by capitalising on the fact the region boasts the countries highest highway density, the proposal explores what would happen if the mobility used to allow expansion anywhere, developing next to the highway routes – forming the RhineRuhrCity.

Why I Blog This: This book, harking back to the studies initial work on MVRDV’s other writings, gives a second example (along with RAMTV’s thesis) of a computerised analysis data program in actual use, and presenting its uses in a visual, user friendly style. Realistically, this is how data will

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Archipelagos, a creation of a bottom-up economy of specialisation, where each city becomes an island in an archipelago of specialisation in the region, for example Oberhausen as city wide shopping mall. (295)

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be used in the future, as ubiquitous assistants to all visionary and design professionals.

Further reading: Manual Castello, The Rise of the Network Society (1996) David Grigg, Regions, Models and Classes, Integrated Models in Geography (1967) Mitchel, City of Bits (1999) To Come:Â Revisiting the initial quote-wall posts and editing them into usable entries, with

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explorations and thoughts based on what has since been discussed.

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4-2.30 2011/10/10 Edinburgh Analysis Project PART I As part of my degree course, a recent study trip was undertaken to Edinburgh to initiate a design project on the city wide analysis.

My groups topic is Networks/Strategies. Perfect to test some of this reading!

We have undertaken data collection of various imports/exports, both of goods and people, among mapping other factors to produce a tangible networks of interconnectable cards. The idea is that in conjunction with these quantitative data cards, and other qualitative, experiential cards, a web of futures and events for Edinburgh is formed.

But instead of manipulating these facts to form one single outcome “Wild” cards are being introduced, which speculate on possible futures and occurrences in Edinburgh’s and the Global timeline, which can be slotted into the network and the web adjusted to show the outcome.

In this way, the network becomes a design tool, able to adapt to possible ‘Wild,’ unpredictable futures in unforeseen ways and allow community input into connections between various facts and nodes within the web.

I shall update this post come the weekend, when the Web will be completed and assembled in a review format and the idea can be shown in pictures.

PART II

The idea was that each ’tile’ within the model represented a single piece of data from a single timeframe or reference material, depending on theme, and could be assembled together with the other tiles to create one of many possibilities representing the state of interconnectedness of today’s global networks, and how they can not be avoided, even at a micro scale, for example the core region of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Together the model is a visual representation of the web of networks, and is presented as a tool to visualise and work with the networks that designers often overlook and neglect the matrix of influence a single change can affect.

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As a finale to the previous post detailing the undertaking of an analysis project in Edinburgh, the project wrapped up last Friday. Over the two weeks that the project ran, the work evolved from a collection of data and mapping their interactions to a more interactive model that worked on a similar level to a “financial model.”

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Interactive Model

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Additional, ‘Wild Cards’ were added into the mix, presented as a picture scenario and ‘Wild’ printed on the reverse. These cards are designed to be slotted into the model matrix at any location, beginning or end and can be used as ‘What If?’ cards for future speculation. Following the insertion of the Wild Card, the model can be reacted to the scenario in a very analogue, ‘hands-on’ manner. Finally, Blank Cards were also created, and allowed for the possibility of functioning as Outcomes to the Wild scenarios, or as unforeseen linkages to the cards already presented in the matrix.

Wild Cards, and Timeframe ‘Locators’ Upon presenting our tool to the group during reviews, members of the peer group were invited to interact with the model, that had been disassembled to its constituent parts, and recreate the model in an entirely new manner, highlighting the myriad possibilities of the interactive model, and of the network web in general.

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Peer Group interaction We believe the process was a success with what was presented, however the scheme also has scope for improvements, not least the addition of more nodes of tiles to the web.

Why I Blog This: This project as a method of analysing the complex web of networks and

strategies of Old Town, and Edinburgh in general, allowed a way of utilising the information already digested throughout this study in a much more hands-on and practical manner. The project opened my eyes to the power of using data to visualise information, whether in digital (as most programs are), or in analogue (as this game was presented in) forms.

To Come: The project is to be expanded, experimenting with the suggestions outlined in the final paragraph and will probably be presented in a Manual format, explaining in infographic, pictorial and text-based format the meanings, instructions and outcomes of this project.

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Some feedback presented from the tutors included the further structuring of the newly-dubbed ‘game’ and embracing the fun, hands-on aspect of the tool; suggestions included presented a manual of use, outlining how to tackle the game, and what to make of the outcomes. Further, a system of categorising the cards was outlined, giving each tile a series of colours around the edges: expressing a more limited range of connectivity, and a more focused outcome. Finally, the Wild Cards could be further expanded, presenting a wider range of outcomes, allowing a further arm of speculation to be extended from the occurrences that have already been documented.

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4-2.31 2011/10/12 The Networked, Global Society

“While the actual localisation of high-level centres in each period is critical for the distribution of wealth and power in the world, from the perspective of the spatial logic of the new system, what matters is the versatility of its networks. The global city is not a place but a process. A process by which centres of production and consumption of advanced services and their ancillary local societies are connected in a global network, while simultaneously downplaying the linkages with their hinterlands, on the basis of information flow.” (386) This long quote, taken from Manuel Castell’s The Rise of the Network Society, captures two messages I’m going to put forward in this post. First, highlighted in bold here, is the notion that a city has changed its tact from being a collection of places to being in flux, a process, a series of flows. Secondly, the city has managed to transcend its local context in a matter that brings about a macro-scale comparison to global cities and regions around the world. No longer can a locale be analysed in isolation.

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His process is one that “connects advanced services, producer centres, and markets in a global network, with different intensity and at a different scale, depending upon the relative importance of the activities located in each area, vis-a-vis, the global network.” (380) What this identifies is one that, in conjunction with the “spatial concentration of the upper tier of such activities in a few nodal centres of a few countries” (379), is that cities are in contemporary society, considered by the roles they play at a global scale. In addition, the high-tier activities of each region, for example Silicon Valley is one of speciality, as opposed to need, whether social or economical. What this means is that “globalisation stimulates regionalisation” (381). Total speciality is not what is meant here though, each region will have an identifier while still maintaining essential individuality.

As discussed by MVRDV in the Regionmaker, regions and cities of today should embrace their roles and adjust spatially to best utilise this new specialisation. However, one cannot fall into the trap of perceiving “the simplistic opposition between automation at the centre and lowcost manufacturing at the periphery. It is organised in a hierarchy of innovation and fabrication articulated in global networks” (393). Networks are organised more organically and in more complicated ways than simply top-down approaches.

Further, he states that the “nodes of the network, that is the location of strategically important functions of the network” (413), will continue to define the region, in such a manner that they need not necessarily spring from the physical locality, more the function within the network: “the function to be fulfilled by each network defines t characteristic of places that become their privileged nodes” (414). For example, the French Health Administration at Villejuif sprang from “accidental, historical reasons” (414), but has since come to define that node of the network. It, along with the Mayo clinic in Rochester, and Silicon Valley, have since used their functions to define and expand their region: bringing staff, researchers, and the whole supporting cast, expanding and bringing a new identity to the region that is distinct from its physical form. This is raised by MVRDV’s Regionmaker

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program, where it identifies various scenarios for region-defining, specialisation being the core of a few examples.

However, much of this historical accidents cannot be predicted by previous data, and could potentially be a danger within the system, requiring ‘Wild’ cards (ref: Edinburgh Analysis Project) to predict and project the outcomes.

The first point raised at the beginning is the shift of city from place to flow: functions are evolving

from the “notion of industrial location from factory sites to manufacturing flow” (393). This is leading to a shift in society’s organisation, and by extension, the way space is perceived and organised. In Castell’s words, “space is not a reflection of society, it is its expression… space is not a photocopy of society, it is society” (410). This leads to an interesting debate on the new role of space, and how it will manage to adjust to a network, flow-based society.

Castell proposes a new vision of space as embodying “time-sharing social practices… that space brings together those practices that are simultaneous in time” (411). Though the actual

implementation of this is left vague. He, however, expands his initial point in the creation of a “new spatial form characteristic of social practices that dominate and shape the network society, the space of flows… (it) is the material organisation of time-sharing social practices that work through flows” (412). This concept, that place is a designed location bringing together various activities dependant on time rather than, necessarily, subject is key I believe. Function needs to adapt to the shifting of roles in the physical environment.

“There has always been a strong semi-concious connection between what society (in its diversity) was saying and what architects wanted to say” (418).

Rem Koolhaas claims to work to “theorise the need to adapt architecture to the process of delocalisation” (421), and while I hold that he is at the mainstream forefront of redefining architecture in contemporary times, architecture might not be capable of merely ‘adapting’ to delocalisation, it needs a revolution of analysis and foresight to change its essence away from contemporary function towards a simultaneous multi-function – the blurring of traditional typologies.

“Place is a locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical continuity” (423). What this book has drawn my attention to is that place is becoming more and more distanced from traditional function, and multi-function is becoming, paradoxically,

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While the article continues to discredit this statement under the current/future climate of networked flux, I believe that this still holds true, merely that architecture needs to adapt, as it always has in its ponderous manner, to reconnect with the disconnect forming between modern needs and traditional function. As is claimed within the book, “the coming of the space of flows is blurring the meaningful relationship between architecture and society” (418); this again, I believe is merely a short-term drawback. As ever in its history, architecture will readjust. As architecture once redefined form as following function, soon it will be able to define form as following function as following society. As following data networks.

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more specialised in its use. One needs to adjust analysis for perceive and react to this change.

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Flow is causing a place-network disconnect. Traditional work at office, sleep at home, play at leisure is becoming more and more blurred. Architecture needs to play catch-up to these (nonrecent) revolutions in society and create new spaces, much as the Seattle Public Library pertains.

A redefinition of existing typology through data, caused by the very proliferation of accessible datainformation that is the cure.

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4-2.32 2011/10/18 Else/Where - Realising New Mapping with Networks All quotes and information taken and derived from Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies, edited by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall.

Dick van Weelden opens the discussion on Mapping Networks in his essay Possible Worlds, arguing “the word “space” in “cyberspace” is highly metaphoric and cannot be separated from the activity conducted within it because the activity is what produces this “space”” (26). This distinction between real space and virtual space highlights the mapping issues, despite the fact that one cannot be simply mapped onto the other, they must however be considered as influencing one another regardless.

On a matter of analysing this data, van Weelden opens his discussion by stating “don’t ask questions about the political, social and moral issues raised by the new and powerful interplay between digital space and the physical world” (26), especially when “beautiful, powerful and innovative results are logged when network mapping overlooks the social and moral dimensions” (27). This discussion argues, that by distancing oneself from the meaning of the data and impartially representing the facts, new visualisations and paths can be represented, highlighting new zones of thinking in political, social and physical spheres.

He closes this discussion with the succinct quote, “metadata open(s) up new transformative ways of tackling social or ecological problems” (27).

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the Skitter Graph, courtesy of CAIDA, maps the links between ISPs and can represent the various times that the world connects to the net in real-time.

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Other forms of data, such as social communicative networks, interacts differently with the physical. “Social software wants to turn parts of the physical world into a digital network. Or, more accurately, the coupling of the digital and the physical take place resolutely according to patterns of digital communication. Geography comes into it, but in a diffuse way” (28). This interaction between the two worlds represents one area of overlap – people being brought together, close through a digital network rather than a physical. This is reinforced by J.J. King in The Node Knows, “things that are symbolically related are brought into a network proximity that can mitigate or redeem physical distance” (45). This manner of “network mapping reveals that connectivity is not virtual at all” (29).

King continues his discussion relating to the work of Castells, “flows are not just one element of the social organisation; they are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political or symbolic life” (The Rise of the Network Society, Castells, pp.412-413). This discussion of flows is yet more of a discussion of the change of the world network from static to flux, despite the fact that King points out Castell’s outdated thinking: discussing network in terms of “electronic circuit” as opposed to “network.” King later discusses a new method, of node-up, rather than top-down: as each node “knows its own reasons for taking part in the network, with whom it interacts and why, and in what modality” (49). This new method can take can each node and show it in its own personal context as opposed to merely its connections, representing the network in a truer and more meaningful way.

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Further in the book, architect Ole Bouman, in Re:Orientation, takes the context of network

mapping and places it into the context of architectural design: “architects provide people with orientation, but now they do so not to help people stand still, but to allow them to move” (54). This vision for architectural movement is represented in the virtual world by the shift to a networked society of flows. The visualisation of data flows is “not about fixed positions, but rather a matter of visualising tensions of various kinds” (55), that that data maps can “reveal their mutual force fields” (55). By analysing this data from the outset in this new manner, visualisations can be created with new, three-dimensional, and interactive, parametric options: “instead of merely suggesting an order, modern maps also present processes” (56).

On a visualisation basis, Bouman discusses that they can represent “totally unrealisable visions at the national and international level, which, for all their rhetoric, no longer have a clear purpose” (57). He extrapolates, argues that there is a growing divide between architects operating at a site-scale level, investigating new built forms, while other (visualisation) architects, can sometimes focus too much on the wider scale. Closing, he raises the point that architects should further investigate the possibility of intermediate scale design, at the range of the region: further discussed and explored by MVRDV in their work/program, The Regionmaker.

He warns, however, that as designers, architects must interact actively with such maps, and the new sheer data content can allow one to “stand above reality and simultaneously be totally overwhelmed by it” (56). He continues to describe that “while they (patterns of movement) are being rendered more understandable, there seem to be little ambition to change these patterns” (57). His discussion to architects, therefore, is that they both understand these newly discovered

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networked flow diagrams, and actively engage with them on a progressive level, changing and pushing the limits of the flow diagram into new realms.

Bouman continues to reassess the role of architects in a digital networked society: “If architects make the shift to this new kind of practice, it will be because they are unwilling to concede their role as contextualizers of our culture” (55), making particular reference to Rem Koolhaas and OMA, such as the Seattle Public Library, previously discussed.

Closing, Bouman and other other authors discuss methods of representing data: as flows (King), as impartial designers of metadata, distant from social, and political issues (Weelden), and as the starting point for progressive explorations of the map as a design tool (Bouman).

As a final aside on the expanding data networking, a developing aspect is that of Augmented Reality (AR), whereupon the final divide of real and virtual will collide: “the world and the map will finally fit in one and the same lived environment” (Weelden, 28). This issue could represent the final overlap of data and real world, and is the ultimate in provocation for data-led development and consideration.

Why I Blog This: The book, at least the section of Mapping Networks, was very useful at exploring various methods of utilising and representing data from Why Data, to outcomes of the data approach. Some points, such as Bouman’s observations, stand out from others, and push my cognition of data map usage to new heights.

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Augmented Reality: Current levels, possibly developing to full real time incorporation

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4-2.33 2011/10/18 Quiet, We Live in Public

Last thursday I attended a showing of Quiet, We Live in Public, a documentary advertised as being about the effects of the internet on social lives. However, the doc was a lot more focused and niche in scope, focusing on the antics of dot com boomer Josh Harris. Despite this, the documentary brought up interesting thoughts on the effects that constant surveillance, and by extension dat collection, can have on society.

Throughout the film, especially with the study of the “installation”, namesake We Live in Public, various points were raised on the dangers of opening oneself completely. In his installation, Josh gives various ‘inmates’ an underground hotel with all amenities provided, with the disclaimer that they are under 100% surveillance. The piece raises interesting comparatives to an architecture that is so networked and self-sufficient it is able to propagate itself, and become insular and self-destructive. This is the reverse of the ideal, where the global network of flows hopefully lends itself to the extroversion and connection of genuine pieces of architecture.

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A later iteration of We Live in Public, Harris streaming himself and his girlfriend’s home life 24/7 raised other interesting points of internet life. The camera’s in his piece focused on movement, leading to various events in the couples life to be shown in the viewing. When the couple was on good terms the camera work flowed smoothly, following the pair about the house. However, when rifts emerged and fights broke out, the camera reflected this raised agitation, flitting between individuals as they exist out of unity with one another.

Later, audience contribution is shown to have an interaction with the participants, dictating actions, acting as overlord, and in power over the view. The piece became dependant on viewers, who controlled their vision – as architecture can enable through interactivity.

Overall the film, while not as directly related as I initially hoped, was an interesting watch, and raised many concerns over the proliferation of internet communication gone overboard and approaching the new network from all the wrong angles.

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4-2.34 2011/10/19 The Increasing Digitalisation of Society Quotes taken from Digital Matters, Paul Taylor & Jan Harris, and Digital Culture, Charlie Gere.

“The significance of a medium is the change in pace and scale it brings to human affairs.”

The opening quote, (McLuhan, cited in Taylor/et al, p.89), really is a eye-opener when it comes to the digital world. Considering the proliferation of the television and telephone networks, both in society, and ubiquity in architecture, the comparative explosion in digital computing and networks should be considered more heavily, as repeated by Gere, “this speeding up is directly related to the increasing ubiquity and availability of media, digital or otherwise” (Gere, 209). He continues by exploring “the increasing speed at which world-transforming events take place” (Gere, 209).

This focus on increasing significance of the digital form, and the simultaneous increase in datatransferrance and sharing is a major factor in the current social climate, and also how we interact with it: “we are no longer passive consumers of the media, but increasingly also active producers” (Gere, 213). With information being so readily, and speedily, available, the change in social information is also guaranteed. This is exemplified in the Wikipedia, or other Wiki sites, built from the bottom up by individuals, the website is a living example of the potential of data collection and amassing from multidisciplinary backgrounds to produce a massive mine of analytical information.

The increasing number of bottom-up possibilities is reflected by the global change from centres of space, work, geography, to a network of nodes and information. Additionally to these social issues, every aspect of our lives can now be interpreted as a network of information, as written by Kittler, “regardless of whether these networks transmit information (telephone, radio, television) or energy (water supply, electricity, highway) they all represent forms of information (if only because every modern energy flow requires a parallel control network)” (Kittler, cited in Taylor/Harris, pp.112-3).

This then leads to the consideration of data collection. As written in Else/Where by Van Weelden one must collect data impartially initially, seeing facts and facts, later to be interpreted. Taylor and Harris repeat this idea, building on Kittler’s theory of identifying the city as a macroprocessor, as a node in the network: “such a perspective necessitates viewing people not as objects but addresses, and goods and communication as data and commands” (Taylor/Harris, 113). However, data collection itself cannot be isolated from ethical issues. For example, on the subject of RFID chips there has been much controversy, such as the notion of tracking every cars journeys at all times. Some Christian groups have even gone so far as to call the chip the ‘Mark of the Beast’ mentioned in the Bible. Does this method of rejecting RFID, or object-following, sensors as leading to a more spatially orientated data collecting device, less about the individual and more about the community?

However, this increasing networking and de-placing of society and cities has led to certain emerging issues, not least of which is the increasing number of Non-Places, regions that “capture the the physical consequences of an exclusively commodified social environment” (Taylor/Harris,

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This consistent increase in data availability, and the change of connections to more flow based structures, lends itself to a more dynamic, less static map, rendition of the world.

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127). This explosion of data transference and media has led to a society of over-saturation, where commodity has become so widespread that the meaning of individual locations has been lost, especially within the “mundane homogeneity of airports, chain hotels…” (Taylor/Harris, 127).

This contrast of increasing availability of information to the individual, yet the simultaneous collapse of identifiable place has created a potential void of built form to be explored. Is it possible to grasp data availability in a manner that recreates a physical form to house a node of the digital network to reconnect and insert itself within the global fabric?

Why I Blog This: These two books are intriguing to me as neither are written with the architectural

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profession in mind, and are geared more towards the information community. However, they both raise interesting points in the medium of data, the collection of the data and some of the potential drawbacks in this. Additionally, they manage to reinforce links that have been developing within the study itself, that hopefully are becoming more transparent as I write.

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4-2.35 2011/10/26 The Virtual City

All quotes taken from William Mitchell, City of Bits “My laptop is an emblematic product of the electronic information age.” (5)

Digital Buildings, from Flickr With this quote, William opens possibly the most complete discussion on what the internet is doing to society I’ve yet come across. He discusses the laptop as an object used and thrown away, that the object isn’t what is important anymore - but the soft data and connection that holds on beyond the hardware life. Additionally, the concept of the laptop as providing a multitude of functions in one place(less area) is a topic that crops up again and again.

As he begins to discuss the effects that the digital revolution is having on our society, Mitchell turns to what it means to be the individual, and how one is now augmented with software, and entering the “era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersection point of the physical and virtual worlds” (167). This idea that the digital medium allows one to extend beyond the trappings of the physical and redefining oneself is one that as designers, we must consider what this means: “we are all cyborgs now. Architects and urban designers of the urban era must begin by retheorizing the body in space” (28).

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Within the book, Mitchell discusses the role that the architect is to play in this new society: “the most crucial task before us is… one of imagining and creating digitally mediated environments for the kinds of lives that we will want to lead and the sorts of communities that we will want to have” (5). This view came up previously, where Bouman discussed the role that architects have to play with interacting with new maps. Mitchell reinforces here that architects need to take the task with firm hands and readjust their role in this web, “architects now need to design for this new condition” (44). He extrapolates this idea a little more, explaining how, as designers, one “can conceive and explore alternate futures, we can find opportunities to intervene, sometimes to resist, to organise, to legislate, to plan, and to design” (50), simply to push the boundaries of each new (cyber)space.

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However, this extension of our reach is not limited to the individual, nor, necessarily, to the benign.

He raises the point that organisations will “look for strategic bottlenecks… through which many things flow by which can easily get cut off. These are the sites where real power is exerted” (150).

In this digital age, it is the internet providers who can alter many levels of connection: how would our media, our information, our work, our social lives, exist with connection lines cut? We must consider this potential dealbreaker in our considers of letting the digital flow freely.

This really all has an impact on our physical locations and our accessibility from these points.

Mitchell discusses throughout the book the impact that this digital medium will have on our physical relationships, an early quotes notes that “the nets’ despatialisation of interaction destroy the geocode’s key” (8), in reference that typical centralisation of cities and areas of power/use are not as easily identifiable as they once were, and distribution in the modern era is a much more subtle affair. Again, “the net negates geometry” (8), allowing an antispatial approach to design and urban arrangement, the structure of the world has become more flexible, switching to the oft-mentioned era of network and flow. Some other points have been raised regarding physical site interaction. “Rooms and buildings now have new kinds of apertures: the scenes that we see through the glass are rescaled and distant, the place on the other side may change from moment to moment, and the action may be a replay” (32). This view of the world, that one can experience any bit of the world from any locations is key underpinning of the networked world, one needs to redefine and rediscover the properties of any typology and refine what they mean. However, “there is no reason to think that this novel condition will make us indifferent to our immediate surroundings or suddenly eliminate our desire for face-to-face human contact in congenial settings” (170). The net, even 16 years after this book was written, still is not an equal competitor the physical, daylight, health, history and character still affects us at a human level that data cannot yet approach. As Mitchell himself proposes, “does Paris have something that telepresence cannot match? Does Rome have an answer to Neuromancer?” (169). This understanding of the cities nature, I believe, is to be the answer to the redefinition of architecture, what once was the defining feature of a typology is to be replaced with whatever is found to be the soul of a physical location.

This leads us nicely to the main discussion within the book - what happens to our existing typologies in a digital world? How do these existing forms react to a world where information is increasingly accessible online? Beginning with a discussion on a library typology, Mitchell argues that the library now functions “as not organising bricks, but software - designing storing, querying, retrieving needs” (49). “Access imperatives no longer play such powerful roles in clustering and organising architectural spaces” (49), access has shifted, no longer does one need to physically explore and acquire information, in a digital world it is possible for one to merely log-on and acquire the same knowledge, through a dimension previously inaccessible to architects. This updating of typology continues to an analysis of the elderly British Library, “functionally, the whole thing was a very large, very slow version of what computer technicians now know as a database server” (55).

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Digital Museums, from NewMediaNow.co.uk Appropriately for my current Studio project (a museum), Mitchell proceeds to tackle this typology from a mass-connected viewpoint, he gives an example that “in a virtual museum digital images of painting, videos of living organisms or three-dimensional simulations of sculptures and works of architecture (perhaps destroyed or un-built ones) stand in for physical objects” (59). However, this is not the case yet, and he states “that museums will increasingly be seen as places for going back to the originals” (60), and I believe that for a while yet this will hold true. Interesting there have been examples of a hybrid of the two examples, such as the Sainsbury wing of London’s National Gallery, where initially one browses the museum’s collection virtually, identifying interests and objects, which are then printed out as a personalised route-map, enabling comparison and viewing of the original pieces.

The idea of the internet terminal that “presents itself as a hearth that radiates information instead of heat” (99) is a recurring theme around the restructuring of space, and one that will “collapse many of the spatial and temporal separations of activities that we have long taken for granted” (100).

What this means is the “profound ideological significance in the architectural recombinations that follow from electronic dissolution of traditional building types and of spatial and temporal patterns”

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As a final typology discussion, I would like to bring up some of his points on office spaces, particularly the fact that “the bonding agent that has held this whole structure together is the need for face-to-face contact with coworkers and clients for close proximity to expensive information processing equipment” (94). This need for face-to-face contact it seems, might be the strongest defender of traditional architectural typologies, however, the idea of “resort offices, where groups can retreat for a time to work on special projects requiring sustained concentration or high intellectual productivity” (95) is also intriguing. In a society where working from home is increasing in number and work at offices is often undertaken at an internet-connected terminal where work and social spheres overlap the possibility of a specialised, focused environment for crunch-work is very thought-provoking. It is interesting, following the commuter points that this technology seems to “permit rather than determine dispersal” (98), and that the rise of home-working is perhaps not as rapid as expected - resistance to a new way of working?

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(102) will create a new range of thought and form-finding approaches for architects and the discipline to tackle.

This changing typology and compression of function will have a significant effect on the physical built form over the coming years, which will be exacerbated further by the increasing implementation of digital technology, such that “in the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and computer interfaces will become buildings” (105), such that the complexity of these networks will increase and become more and more structured. “Increasingly, computers will meld seamlessly into the fabric of buildings and buildings themselves will become computers” (171), the difference between these quotes, for me is the former discusses the nature of building organisation, such that buildings will become more and more comparable to information networking, whereas the latter discusses more the implementation of technology into fabric, creating smart buildings. The logical conclusion in the end is a convergence of the two ideals, of architectural as computer interface seemingly indistinguishable from a computer - cyberspace/ realspace overlapping.

‘This will be a city unrooted to any definite spot on the surface of the earth, shaped by connectivity and bandwidth constraints rather than by accessibility and land values, largely asynchronous in its operation, and inhabited by disembodied and fragmented subjects who exist as collections of aliens and agents. Its places will be constructed virtually by softwares instead of physically from stone and timbers, and they will be connected by logical linkages rather than by doors, passageways and streets” (24).

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What this means for the network society is that we are moving towards a decentralised/placeless era, “it is immaterial rather than bonded to paper or plastic sheets, it is thus instantaneously transferable to any place that has a network connection” (52-3). Additionally, this immateriality and decentralisation is changing consumer habits, blurring the line between consumer and producer as defined by nodes: “every node is potentially both a publication and consumption point, such centralised concentrations of activity will be supplanted by millions of dispersed fragments” (53).

At its very core, the notion of switching to a digital sociecty, or the “worldwide computer network the electronic agora - subvents, displaces, and radically redefines our notions of gathering place, community and urban life” (8).

Even at a personal level, the net redefines our very place and interaction with our environment, as we become more interactive with place and location blends with self: our inhabitation has “less to do with parking our bones in architecturally defined space and more with connecting your nervous system to nearby electronic organs. Your room or your home will become part of you, and you will become part of them” (30). Likewise, a buildings relationship to urban scale will change, “buildings and parts of buildings must now be related not only to their natural and urban context, but also to their cyberspace settings” (104). Therefore this interconnectivity needs to propagate and be integrated into all levels of the urban and humanistic grain to ensure its success, else a fragmented cyber network will disrupt a seamless integration with the new cognitive dimension. “networks at these different levels will all have to link up somehow; the body net will be connected

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to the building net, the building net to the community net, and the community net to the global net” (173).

A quote by Mitchell later mimics Manuel Castell’s flows in that “the emerging result seems to be a complex interaction between established, geographically located urban and regional economies and the increasingly powerful effects of long-distance, almost instantaneous information flows within worldwide virtual communities” (138).

Communication Networks, from Getty Images Our role therefore, in Mitchell’s altered words of Churchill, is to embrace the fact that “now we make our networks, and our networks make us” (49).

This asynchrony in communication represents a complete redefinition in our view of the city, for “in the familiar, spatial, synchronous style of city, there is a time and place for everything” (16).

However, even with this newly disconnected, yet still connected, phenomenon, there still remains some programmes that require a usual way of interacting, for example Mass at a Catholic Church.

There have been attempts to explore a video linked ceremony but these have failed, “but what about immersive, multi-sensory, telepresence at Mass? In a virtual Church?” (20) This redefinition of our experiences is based around the concept of a real place, yet virtual guest, failing, but a virtual place, with a projected guest might just succeed. But this is mere speculation at this point, entirely virtual worlds still remain in their majority within the video gaming community, and MMOs. This could potentially represent an entirely digital, non-place, space for entertainment (or future living?).

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These flows and instant communication are affecting our relationships in previously unforeseen ways, email for example “links people at indeterminate places” (9), while also presenting an “asynchronisity in communication” (15). Email therefore is taking the telephone’s ability to connect over distance and expand, removing time constraints, allowing both a spatial and temporal disconnect between the participants.

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Augemented Reality, from ArchitecturalIllustrators.org There is also the question of going behind virtual communication, through to virtual being, imagine a future where “it will be possible for a person to project by virtual travel to a distant location and initiate actions there through the actuators available at that site” (40), states Warren Robinett, a VR researcher mentioned within the book. Other ways of seeing and experiencing our city are increasing at a rapid pace. The idea of Augmented Reality (AR) is a powerful mechanism, able to overlap and integrate our virtual and spatial lives. As our smartphones develop, and mapping techniques (such as Sat nav and GPS) increase in power, “the real city that surrounds us and the video city that guides us are held in (increasingly) perfect coincidence” (41). This method of integrating is changing the way we as people learn and react to the city, for Lynch’s subjective ‘image of the city’ is becoming less applicable as “we are beginning to know and use cities in different ways... the importance of the learned map and the knowledgeable locals carry about inside their skulls” (43) is becoming less important as one can increasingly refer to their phone, or in the future, a personal overlay of the city onto the physical environment. This intertwining is backed up by Mitchell, that “increasingly, the architectures of physical space and cyberspace are superimposed, intertwined, and hybridized in complex ways” (44).

What this means for us as designers is the increasingly production of “a new architecture without tectonics and a new urbanism freed from the constraints of physical space” (115). There are still,

however, core architectural considerations that remain, for example “in both (cyber and realspace), barriers and thresholds play crucial roles” (121), and it will be the way one balances access and denial – “many places in cyberspace are public, like streets and squares; access to them is uncontrolled. Others are private, like mailboxes and houses” (23) and it will be this finding this balance that is key to one aspect of this new architecture.

“And the new urban design task is not one of configuring buildings, streets and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the cities, but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places and electronic interconnections between them” (160).

At its core, “how should virtual and physical public space relate to one another?” (127), finding and adapting both existing physical typologies and creating new virtual typologies and locating their

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existence, separate, or intertwined and networked?

Why I Blog This: This book, written in 1995, presents many of the core concepts of a digital world and its relation to architecture. Interestingly, it is possible to see which of his predictions, and which didn’t, hold true. As such it forms a core part of my discussion on the why’s and how’s, hence the length of this post is of a digital architecture. Many recurrent themes are discussed within though, and each has a distinct section: The role of the architect/designer The self in the digital world and the power circles Locale and place, and existing typologies, together with the increasing integration of computers within buildings.

Networks and Flows as the core of the new society, and the digital means that are in place to utilise this new arrangement.

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4-2.36 2011/11/02 The Barrier of Form

All information taken from Michael Speak’s article It’s Out There… published in Hypersurface Architecture. This article particularly resonates with my intended second half of my special study – an exploration of existing case studies and approaches to this new globalised architecture, which Speaks refers to as the “ubiquitous globalisation discourse” (26).

“The increasing use of ecological models to explain the relationship between complex, dynamical systems and their environments” (26) is really the lynchpin of my initial discussion, exploring what the complex, dynamical systems are (in my research – digitisation and networking) and visualisations of the above. However, after this usage of exploratory models, there is the issue of architecture. Specifically an architecture “open to external influences” not “a lifeless object on and in which those influences are registered as avant-gardism gestures” (26). Even through history “movement in architecture has involved the arrest of dynamic forces as static forms through mapping” (28), states Cynthia Davidson, in Anywise, such that the new ecological approach is merely a new route in a well trodden path.

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On Greg Lynn’s entry for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, Assemblage magazine asserts that “what is not different or new about this project is its formal strangeness: that is, the fact that it looks so new” (27), yet what is new is the projects ecological aspects. However, the magazine continues to “focus on the ‘look’ and thus on the formal aspects of the relationship between ecology (understood here as one name for a renewed interest in the relationship between complex systems and their environment) and architecture” (27).

In comparison, the work of Rem Koolhaas is again mentioned, in particular his discourse on ‘bigness,’ the “limit beyond which architecture becomes urbanism” (27). This notion of bigness as response to proto-ecologistic methods brings to light the consideration that one must “rethink not only architectural forms but the forms of architectural practice.” (27). In particular it is “architecture’s relationship to its exterior, namely to the globalised urban world in which it must, as a practice, struggle to survive” (27). This condition of a new form of practice is a repeated statement, and brings to mind a previous discussion here on virtual architecture and virtual building. Statements which will be echoed and reinforced by a further look at some of the

American Avant-Gardists. ”To work as an architect with urban forces in their non formalised state it is necessary to design in an environment that is dynamic” (28), states Davidson in Anywise, which reinforces the notion of a new dynamic practice.

As previously mentioned, Assemblage discusses Lynn’s opera house entry as “it is only ‘the look’

that is new” (27) – but the under meaning suggests that Lynn’s only response to “address the complexity of contemporary urban life is through form” (27). Again and again it is mentioned that “Lynn is more powerfully drawn back into contemporary American architecture’s most powerful interiority: form” (28), and it is here that he explores his “search for the new” (28).

At a wider context, the emergence of deconstructivism heralded a search for the hidden meaning

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of the traditional context. However, “many of those interested in little more than ‘the new’ moved on to other theoretical conceits, such as ‘the fold’” (28). Now, I am guilty of studying folded architecture, and pieces of Lynn and Eisenman’s work in the past, which potentially explains my fascination in revoking my earlier testaments. Lynn especially I associate with the argument of “fluid and complex conditions of late 20th-century urban life by calling for architectural forms that are themselves more fluid and complex” (28), for example through his exploration with Alias software.

“Architecture will not literally move, but it must be conceptualised and modelled within an urban field understood as dynamic and characterised by forces rather than forms” (28) [Davidson].

This notion of movement is a subject where architects fall either side of the argument. In a discussion between Lynn and Kipnis, for example, Kipnis criticised Lynn’s new animated modelling approaches: Lynn …”well, are you saying architecture has to move in order for this to be an interesting design approach? I would say no.”

Kipnis “You say no, but you do not show us what happens when you take the motion away.” (29)

Eisenman’s theory revolves around an “interiority” (30), such that “architecture should never, as modernism did, place itself in the service of any exterior discourse, such as politics, or philosophy, but should instead articulate itself as an autonomous practice of form following form” (30). An example stated is the Wexner Centre museum, and is “a form which he argues calls into question the museum type itself and as such is architecture that is dislocative and not simply new” (30).

Lynn as an extension “wants new forms which answer to new, exterior conditions” (30), but neglects “what architecture is, and does. Eisenman calls in question architecture’s humanist interiority – architecture, that is, as a practice of housing and making safe” (30).

Continuously, Eisenman refers to architecture as a interiority of form (and form follows form) whilst “Lynn accepts this interiority and takes form generation as far as it will go” (30).

As an alternative “rather than dislocating form or type, dislocates the form of architectural practice

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This exchange again brings to mind the notion of virtual architecture and building, and of creating a form that is representational rather than functional at a dynamic level. Lynn’s work, for example here, often falls within the digital representation of forces rather than the analytical integration of those same trends. However, there is a notion here of “does this mean that architecture is no more than a static form that arrests those forces?” (29), to which Lynn argues to reverse, architecture as non-static form. “But when it becomes form, the audience asks, when it becomes architecture, does it remain dynamic?” (29). Lynn cannot respond to these allegations, as his work represents design animate, but architecture static- “architect is only the object-form at the end of the process” (29). But “why does his architecture stop moving when it is no longer design technique and becomes architecture” (29). Here, Speaks, and us, the reader, turn to Lynn’s mentor and leading American Avant-Gardist, Peter Eisenman.

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itself” (30), and calls on “animate forms of practice, not on animate forms” (30). Here there is scope to explore the meaning of a globalised, interconnected network as conjoining with a new form of practice and creating a globalised method of architectural practice. By adapting the practice to the new conditions of society as opposed to the form, will architecture become both a “stabilising and an animating force in the metropolis” (30)?

Rem Koolhaas again crops up, with the notion of “forms that look like they are fluid with their urban contexts may in fact interdict, and forms which ‘look like’ they are interdictive may in fact be fluid with their urban contexts” (30). This signifies a change from “what is the essence of architecture?” towards “what can architecture do when it looks to the exterior, to the globalised metropolis.” (30).

Arguably there is a line between architecture now and an architecture that is responsive and fluid with the new society, but this line is not so easily crossed, particularly when one considers these two examples of American avant-gardists, who are stopped at the “border of form” (30), or the virtual building.

“Ultimately, architecture will have to develop a dynamism that matches that of the globalised metropolis” (31), in terms of its practice, and become “an animate for of form shaping” (31).

Further, one can “understand architecture itself as a provisional colony of discrete practices” (31), and when considered alongside Arie de Geus’s The Living Company, as a company/practice “defined not by its product, profits or even corporate ideology, but by its sensitivity to an everchanging, fluid, commercial environment” (31).

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This is really the crux of the matter, I am trying to draw to light “something other than a new set of design techniques,” (31), but more along the lines of a new way of perceiving our society, and orientating ourselves within it, whether through alternative practices or interdisciplinary techniques.

In other words, what I am trying to explore is “‘a pass’ across the border of form” (31).

Why I Blog This To kickstart the reading into the latter half of the study, I begin my tackling of

case studies with two architects who I read in the first two years of my education but now see as limited in their exploration of my concerns. This critical exploration of case studies, where positive or negative will form a discussion towards, as I stated in the main post, a new direction in architectural practice and form making.

Further reading: Folding in Architecture – (Particularly, Towards a New Architecture, Jaffrey Kipnis) Greg Lynn, Animate Form Cynthia Davidson, ed., Anywise Peter Eisenman, Houses of Cards - (Particularly, ‘Misreading’)

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4-2.37 2011/11/27 Finding a Digital Utopia - Musings on Study Focus

More musings on an updated study focus.

The focus of my study really lacked definition previously, tending towards a meandering tackling of digital and scale issues at various times in quite a linear topical progression. I have given the construction of the study more thought to hopefully bring it into a more concise, considered approach, with a more focused outcome.

Leading with a discussion of the increasing usage of digital and data led techniques in the world, and arguing the shift in societal values towards a non-place, networked system of flows of information, goods and people, the study will move towards a more detailed critical view of what this means for architecture, based upon the multi-scale theories proposed by MVRDV, as well as their work on Hyper-Densities in future times. By comparing this with the writings of Koolhaas on Bigness in Architecture, I aim to argue that architecture will tend to become less traditionally spatial, instead shifting towards a much denser, more interconnected and multi-functional, urban scaled buildings and blocks.

As a tackling of this architectural shift, I will discuss the divide in the use of digital means in architecture, from a virtual architecture and virtual building viewpoint, criticising the work of architects such as Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman as inefficient and self-indulgent in a world of constricted space and increased connectivity.

To close on a single, relatively pretentious quote to summise the goal: “to promote an architectural utopia from a potential dystopian future.” blog archive - research & development :APPENDICES 4-2

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4-2.38 2011/11/27 Generative Diagrams and Infrastructural Considerations in Built Form

Taken from Greg Lynn in Folds, Blobs and Bodies: Collected Essays. [Particularly: Forms of Expression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in Architectural Design].

Through this article, Lynn discusses the work of Ben van Berkel (previously written about on this blog), and by extension the work of UNStudio, within a conceptual framework of conceptual diagrams to influence design. This analysis recognises that van Berkel’s design approach focuses on the tackling of “invisible parameters” (224), to “negotiate the gap between ideas and form” in a “non-linear and non-deterministic” way. What is found is that van Berkel’s diagrams cannot be translated to concrete form, and instead form what Lynn calls ‘proto-functionalist’ (231) in its approach.

This provides links to the discussion of virtual architecture previously held. Van Berkel’s work lies strictly within this camp, albeit in an analogue as much as digital manner. It is described by Lynn as “using abstraction in a generative rather than reductive manner” (232).

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In fact, this opposition of reduction in Architecture runs through multiple essays in this publication, for example Blobs, (pp.157-168), in which Lynn comments on complexity theory in architecture, such that building cannot be reduced to single forms and concepts, but to a network, a web, of influence and conceptual cues.

Further discussion is held in the first article, as mentioned, “despite the continued interest in programs of electrical switching, highway planning, civil and structural engineering…” (231), that van Berkel’s work is highly interested in multi-disciplinary and infrastructural considerations. This consideration is reminiscent of writings by Rem Koolhaas (S,M,L,XL) during which he discusses the concept of ‘bigness’ in architecture, or the increasing scale of architecture tending towards urban planning levels.

Whether this usage of generative diagrams to build in an infrastructurally considerate manner lends itself to architectural ‘bigness’ remains to be seen, much as the increasing scale of architecture is still a concept on the horizon, but it is something that must be tackled soon, lest it get the better of us.

Why I Blog This: Not least because its my first post in a while, this post represents my reading of some of Greg Lynn’s essays. However, when expecting to tackle this approach in a critical manner, his discussion of van Berkel’s work led to some more immediate considerations, which I tried to express here in a concise, train of thought, manner.

Alexander Farr

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4-2.39 2011/11/28 Two Approaches to a New Architecture

All information taken from Folding in Architecture, edited by Greg Lynn.

This book, originally published in 1988, collects together projects and articles written on the subject of folding in architecture, particularly proto-digital architecture that were later realised with splines. Lynn mentions during the introduction that these architects were trending towards complex forms even pre-digital means, with “some case facilitated by, often mimicking in anticipation of, or were asking for the assistance from,” (10) advanced CAD packages. In essence, these architects were creating a “new model of formal and spatial complexity before the advent of inexpensive, ubiquitous, spline modelling software” (10). Lynn continues arguing this point, discussing that these architects would (and were) creating this architecture before, and without, depending on CAD programs. “It is important to imbue digital technologies with some creative and intellectual force that engages the historical or architectural problems and ambitions” (11).

This distinction is explored in more depth in the article Towards a New Architecture, by Jeffrey

Kipnis where he explores the distinction between two new architectures that are being explored in the digital era, and overlap with previous discussed virtual architecture and virtual building. Kipnis defines this new architecture with five points of definition, points, blanks, vast, incongruent, and intensively incongruent. Through this points, Kipnis argues that these architects explore the concept of a free plan through to a free section, and from a free facade through to a free massing, creating a more unique and fluid final proposal.

Kipnis defines these two different architectures as “DeFormation” and “InFormation,” both of which map fairly accurately onto virtual building, and architecture, respectively. DeFormatist architecture is the focus of this book, including within its ranks Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman, and is the “role of new aesthetic form” in architecture and focusing on the “visual in the engenderment of new spaces” (59). Comparatively, InFormation architecture includes the work of Rem Koolhaas, previously discussed, and Bernand Tschumi, and “de-emphasises the role of aesthetic form in favour of new institutional form” (59), and also focuses on the orthogonal language of modernism.

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Despite this feeling that the projects could exist without the focus of CAD programs, it remains that the projects remain primarily interested in geometry and advanced form finding techniques.

For example, two projects by Peter Eisenman (the Rebstock Park Masterplan, and Alfreka Office Building) are discussed not as an object but as an event at the scale of urbanism – “it is ‘eventalised,’ opened up, un-folding. It is becoming” (44). Yet it is still concerned with the becoming of form. Further, his project at the Center for the Arts in Atlanta is based around the analysis of the “historical quadrangle configuration,” it is a grid system “deformed by the topography of the ravine when extended to the Center’s site” (47). This usage of diagrams to define advanced geometries of form really defines, and arguably restricts, this form of architecture. There is so much untapped potential in the digital diagram, and part of me refuses to accept that it should be used entirely in form finding.

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Essentially, DeFormation is the investigation of new Geometries, while InFormation is the usage of New Technologies, in architecture. Further, DeFormation is argued as finding built form despite concerning itself with “no architectural form other than the function” and with “no informing choreography nor any use of technology” (60).

This discussion of DeFormation architecture throughout the book is reinforced by the consistent focus on form generation in articles, through, for example, axial lines, diagrams, and geometry,

among others. However, this architecture is “replete with instital and residual spaces, and intrinsic to non-development surfaces” (63). However, this consistent usage of site and folding diagrams focusing on form generation feels limiting when one approaches a high-density urban scale, as the lack of focus on interior considerations with careful and creative arrangements feels limiting, and relatively shallow in terms of considerations for users.

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Why I Blog This: This book really surmises the focus of this type of advanced form finding and its diagrammatic usage in a very aesthetically minded manner, although the criticism of Lynn and Eisenman is welcome in the construction of my study argument. Additionally, the stumbling upon the definition of De- and In-Formation Architecture is really helpful in my argument, particularly with its overlap with my previous discussions of Virtual Architecture and Building.

Alexander Farr

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4-2.40 2011/12/03 Automatic, Authorless and Variable Architectures

in an article published in the Harvard Design Magazine (spr/sum 2010, n.32), Wes Jones, in Big Forking Dilemma, discusses the various turns architecture has taken post-deconstruction, specifically a divide opening between an authorless approach, and a variable approach, both of which have previously been discussed within this post/study.

Essentially the divide splits along already established lines: authorless comprising work methods by firms such as MVRDV, BIG, OMA, and other, ‘anonymous’ acronym practices. On the other hand, variable architecture covers work by Eisenman and hints at Lynn’s work with ‘Blobs.’

Throughout the article, Jones takes a critical approach to his analysis of both aspects of this architectural turn, and the increasing impact of computing and the digital world on architectural practice. By defining the Dutch firms as relying on computational techniques, and favouring the “pragmatism of statistics and quantifiable cultural research,” he argues that the firms are responding to architectural problems with a type of nihilism, and reducing architectural wilfulness to the sidelines and being replaced with “something objective, external, quantifiable.”

He continues, pointing out that most of these Dutch firms are offshoots of OMA and Koolhaas’s teachings, leading to somewhat of a consistent, if faintly derivative language.

This essentially marks cleverness, if it is indeed an independent movement, as crucially self defeating, it is “too busy weaving around the field, feinting and dodging, to care about forward or behind.” By taking Koolhaas’s studies as an example, one can take his analysis of infrastructure within Lagos, State-run Media in Dubai, and his own book Delirious New York, to see how cleverness takes analysis from each programme in turn, and is characterised by its position to its own product, rather than to the movement as a whole.

Again this argument of cleverness can be applied to MVRDV’s work, which can be defined as overtly computational, and managing to “forge a signature for their work through a continued project without resorting to personal expression or seeming to violate cleverness’s aloofness,” through objective number analysis. This can be recognised within their density obsession as design catalyst and their writings, particularly Metacity/Datatown and the Functionmixer program.

In all these works, the route to product is the point, with the product “no more or less than the final state of the process that led to it.”

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This language, developed by Koolhaas and other Dutch practices, Jones names Cleverness and positions himself as a critic of this movement. There is an underlying message of immobility in his discussion of the movement, in which cleverness responds to architectural problems in a manner in which itself is a product of the specific brief, rather than part of an innovative progression. By creating its message in a clever, sometimes ironic, response to the problem, cleverness places itself as an end in itself, with “architecture becom(ing) the means to achieving it.” As Jones writes, “cleverness requires a host, but… it does not seek to improve the host.”

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Indeed, one can argue that this authorless architecture, one untempered by architectural judgement is part of a “depletion of design” and, as Jones posits, due to a feeling of “inadequacy to the world’s problems.” He argues that architecture is using this feeling as a “license to play freely “in” and “against” that larger world without consequence. Further, one can consider this license a feeling of architecture taking the wrong approach to tackling this feeling of inadequacy.

Which is unusual, as there is potential here, as architecture can analyse the world in more and more ways, especially through the use of data, to create real change, and repositioning of architecture to recover its position as definer of usable spaces.

However, there is the matter of the other fork in this path to consider. Taking Eisenman’s work as a major example, Jones analyses his work as the study to a “near figure, or “undecidable”” or “unstable object.” This path of architecture, in contrast to the use of data to discover a fixed, almost unavoidable, form at the end of rigorous analysis, is the result of data/form finding producing a variable outcome, one that is almost embarrassed to pick one result. More recently, with the progression of digital techniques, Eisenman’s diagrams have become appropriated by proteges such as Greg Lynn, who have worked within “the blob” and other influences, such as biomimicry. Uniformly, each proponent of this type of architecture pushes the “uniqueness” of their outcome, one that, practically, only matters as an “outcome of its indexical relationship to the flow, forces, or other influences engaged by the script.”

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Versioning as a form of architecture is described by Jones as a “blunt, inelegantly literal production of a chorus of alternatives” that “leads to work that is flat and lifeless.” Indeed, I am inclined to agree, the consistent NURBs analysis of form and site characters has lend to aesthetically interested, but programmatic dull work. He compares this to Eisenman’s “fraught work,” which he describes as being a product of the architect’s wilfulness to “exceed his own volition” and ‘presence of absence.’

In conclusion, Jones argues that the future holds the restoration of the computer “as a tool rather than a program,” to avoid the finding of the digital as the end in itself. He finishes with the “seismic division between authored and authorless (or wilful and automatic design),” and how these may be forks in the road. However, I am inclined to argue that these new discoveries of form finding and programme analysis created within the boundaries of cleverness and propagated by the likes of Koolhaas and OMA/MVRDV/BIG/etc, could in fact be the automatic design generation that will eventually lead us to the creation of a new wilful design output – neither will be separate from the other, and we move from form follows function to wilful design following automatic analysis.

Why I Blog This the article came at an essential time for my reading, and presents a critical

distance to the work of the acronym firms I previously have placed on a pedestal. By viewing their work from a distance, it was possible to see their shortcomings, but also where they succeed, and potentially be able to create the beginnings of a new architectural route through their workings.

Alexander Farr

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courtesy of Trevor Patt @ Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/trevorpatt/5097917412/)

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