FUZZ

PennDesign Post-Professional Design Studio Fall 2009 Winka Dubbeldam, Director Ferda Kolatan Roland Snooks

Preface Florida has always occupied a special place in the American imagination: the land of beaches and sunshine, baseball training camps, retirement communities of every configuration, orchards of the vitamin-giving grapefruits and oranges that generations of American learned to drink each morning, and the site of restlessly inventive real estate speculation. Situating this year’s post-professional design (ppd) studio in the citrus state opened the studio’s recent explorations in pre-fabrication to the remarkable variety of utopian aspirations that developed from the promises of Florida. The most ambitious of these utopias—Disney World, EPCOT, and Venus—project entirely new ways of building and living realized through uniquely expressed infrastructural and symbolic systems.

The immediate challenge of this ppd studio revolved around the proliferation of variable and adaptable components, elements of construction and occupation conceived in relation to larger systems of performance, including a particular utopian potential. The most elusive aspect of this project is the compelling appeal of adaptation itself, which promises both the perfection of “fit,” and the potential of imperfect or failed components from which hierarchies and richness ultimately emerge (what is a pricing structure but a grading of the outcome of design). Abandoning the potential of utopian perfection in favor of messier systems of adaptive configurations releases the potential of architecture, itself a restless form of social adaptation.

Dr. William W. Braham Interim Chair

PP@PD POST-PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM AT PENN DESIGN [09/10]

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Winka

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Roland

004 // The Venus Project

065 // Utopia Upgraded

123 // A Non-Linear Challenge to Tectonics

Jacque Fresco

Chris Perry

Simon Kim

Christopher Allen 006 // Urban Infection Nidhi Arya 012 // Topo-Polis Matt Choot 016 // Gradient Green Kittiya Choowanthanapakorn 022 // The Waternet Community Andrew Haney 026 // Genetic Urbanism Jun Young Lee 030 // Mingle_Mangle Seongbeom Mo 034 // Urban Colony Jieyu Pu 044 // Growing Urban Landscape Jeff Palitsch 048 // Generating a New Urbanism Qiao Song 052 // Nested Neighborhoods Kadambari Srinivasan 056 // Biotic Habitation Ana Untiveros 060 // Spongious City

Mehdi Alibakhshian 066 // Fluid Motion Jacob Chandler 070 // Swamp Suburb Yao Chen 074 // Non-Linear Utopia Florina Dutt 078 // Coccoliths Chun Fang 082 // Fabricated Surface Jisu Han 086 // Dynamic Flow Danielle Rivera 090 // Self-Sufficient Suburbia Cheng Wei Lin 094 // Dynamic Utopia Community Keiko Vuong 098 // Dynamic wall system Xuedong Wang 102 // The Unseparated City Ziyue Wei 104 // Utopia Community Tya Winn 112 // Urb Kilombo Jihyoon Yoon 114 // Intermediary Housing Jingyi Zhao 118 // Activated Continuity

Liwen Mao 124 // Negotiable Hierarchy Rui Bao 130 // Urban Negotiations James Bowman 134 // Polycube Urbanism April Qi Chen 138 // Negotiable Publicity Emaan Farhoud 142 // Structure, Enclosure & Urban Fibrosity Hye Seung Lee 146 // Osmosis Urban Ornament Marta Mackiewicz 150 // Agency of Structure and Ornament Changsoon Park 154 // Urban Vector Andrew Swartzell 158 // Generating the Image of the City Han Tang 162 // Tequila Yang Wang 170 // Utopian Space Description Yiqin Wang 174 // City Generation Wenqing Zhang 178 // GeoSwarm

DUBBELDAM KOLATAN

040 // Total City Systems

110 // A Few Thoughts on Architecture, Technology, Monumentality, and Program

SNOOKS 168 // Command and Control

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Winka Dubbeldam

Director of PP@PD

THE VENUS PROJECT It is common in our mass-media to read and to hear commentators talk about the number of social problems that face us today, such as global warming, destruction of Earth’s environment, unemployment, crime, violence, poverty, hunger, and the population explosion. Yet, how often do we hear of workable plans for alleviating many of these social problems? It is relatively simple for people to criticize society, however it’s much more difficult to identify and implement plans to resolve the problems.

-Jacque Fresco, The Venus Project

This year’s Post-graduate studio project looked to invent a new architecture where social engineering and new production methods meet. We asked the students to rethink the possibilities afforded by these two important objectives, and develop designs for how they may converge as a new settlement.

We believe that the implications of this experimental research will be broad and international in scope. We are not looking for small retrofits of old models, instead, we are looking for innovation and alternative futures.

It is in Florida that we find three related future city models; the Venus project by Jacques Fresco, the Epcot design by Walt Disney, and Celebration, a residential community built by the Walt Disney Company based on the original Epcot design.

EPCOT Walt Disney’s original plan for EPCOT, a utopian community in Florida, was a community that he called the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. In February of 1967, two months after Walt Disney’s death, Walt Disney Productions announced that it would be going ahead with the project closest to Walt’s heart at the time of his death, a “city of tomorrow” to be built adjacent to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Echoing the words of John Winthrop, Walt explained that he “would like to be part of building a model community, a City of Tomorrow... this might become a pilot operation for the teaching age - to go across the country and across the world.” Eerily, this announcement to the press was narrated by Walt himself in a film that he had taped for the purpose before his death. “The most exciting, and by far the most important part of our Florida project, in fact that heart of everything we will be doing in Disney World,” announced Walt, “will be our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. We call it EPCOT. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.” In the film Walt explained in detail his dream of creating a community that would be a technological and futuristic utopia. It was to be the home of 20,000 residents, and its purpose was to explore new ideas in urban planning.

Walt said “I don’t believe there’s a challenge anywhere in the world that’s more important to people everywhere than finding solutions to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin...how do we start to answer the great challenge?”

CELEBRATION Celebration was conceived as a way to build upon Walt’s original vision for a utopian community.

While some of Walt’s ideas have been preserved, the Disney Company also made several changes.

For example, although Celebration’s residents are allowed to own their homes, and retirees are allowed to reside there, the residents are not allowed any form of local representative government, and there is a class screening process inherent in the price scale that Disney has adopted for the property that they are offering for sale.

VENUS: A Technological and Futuristic utopia We also find the Venus Project in Florida. It was designed by Jacque Fresco, who works both as a designer and an inventor in a wide variety of fields, ranging from biomedical innovations to totally integrated social systems. Fresco’s Research City design has some aspects in common with Disney’s Epcot proposal. In his essay, “Total City Systems,” Fresco states, “It would be far easier and would require less energy to build new, efficient cities than to attempt to update and solve the

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problems of the old ones.” Architecture has attempted to meet the challenges of production and construction only through relatively small, incremental innovations throughout the twentieth century.

In the Venus Project, however, Fresco starts to investigate more extreme innovations such as robotic construction, self-erecting towers and shape-memory alloys. Although many of these innovations may continue to inspire, we are clearly entering a new phase where construction methods need to be reconsidered relative to new environmental and economic pressures. Fresco states, “If technology does not liberate all people for the pursuit of higher aspirations in human achievement, then all its technical potential will be meaningless.”

From the Mechanical to the Organic The rewriting and innovation of architectural design and its structures requires a revolutionary change in the thinking of how architecture is conceived now. Moving beyond the 1960s notion that a building is a composite of standardized elements such as columns, floors, and walls, we have to rethink a building as composed of mass-customized “generative components.” Prefabrication as pure repetition of standard elements is an outdated mode of operation; mass-customized units are evolving as a series of varying elements, defined by an analysis of specific performance, rather than just structural requirements. Standard repetition has been replaced by custom variation facilitated by new digital methods of fabrication.

The most significant technical innovations of the era, from the skyscraper to moving pictures and the automobile, were made possible by inventions – electric motors (lifts), incandescent lamp, internal combustion engine, etc. – which themselves depend on more fundamental breakthroughs in the harnessing and exploitation of energy, most notably of the electromagnetic spectrum. Wireless telegraphy and later wireless home radio set, the electrification of private homes, streets and public spaces, the proliferation of telephones and automobiles together gave a new fluidity, and a new consistency, to everyday space.”

-Sanford Kwinter, “The New Plasticity.”

The components’ intelligence refers more to automotive and aerospace design than to architectural design and is more system-based than mechanical assembly-based. Prefabrication itself is changing as well: where before it would be described as the industrial manufacturing of the same repetitive element, now units are custom-manufactured in a series of varying elements, specific in its use and in its efficiency. This more organic and systems-driven thought process is new for architects, but common ground for scientists and industrial designers. “Technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts,” writes Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, “And it finds most of its use after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.”

The studio analyzed and mapped different biological systems to inform versions of “smart components,” which then resulted in an assembly of building components for the residential settlement. These smart units contain integral functionalities rather than applied technologies. The units, and their clustering, provide a new alternative applicable to urban housing and suburban neighborhoods. Here high-density urban housing might result in a new scale; the units cluster into a structure, which finds itself between a large building and a neighborhood. The house’s components will learn from and be derived from an intelligent system, and hence be organized by a varying component system with “sequential variation,” “transmutation,” and density. Structure, traditionally a result of engineering, will now be analyzed as a biome. As Kevin Kelly observes with respect to companies, architectural structures can develop and behave not unlike organisms evolving in an ecosystem. The study of smart components researched both through data and experimentation will not only change the way architecture is designed, manufactured, and assembled, but essentially allow for an innovative approach for how architecture could develop in the millennia to come.

References: Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1997. 245.

Fresco, Jacque. The Venus Project: the Redesign of a Culture. Venus, Fla.: Global Cyber-Visions, 1995.

Kelly, Kevin. New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World. New York, N.Y.: Viking, 1998. 83.

Kwinter, Sanford. “The New Plasticity.” Architectures of Time toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001. 56.

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Christopher Allen

Dubbeldam Studio

URBAN INFECTION

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Viruses are viewed by many not as living organisms, but rather organisms “on the edge of life”. They do resemble living things in that they possess genes, evolve, and reproduce.

However, it is impossible for them to live autonomously. They exist only through their parasitic relationships with host organisms, and their utilization of the biochemical machinery of the host cells which they invade to propagate, multiply, and advance. It is the parasite to host, or virus to cell, relationship that I investigated with a focus on the strain of H1N1 flu virus that has resurfaced recently. By tracing the evolution of this particular strain and extracting the intelligence encoded within it, I applied the

efficiency with which it assembles, mutates, replicates, migrates, and survives in many environments to a new architectural typology.

Viruses cannot live on their own, yet they are the most abundant biological entity on the planet.

They can exist in every ecosystem, and are one of the fastest evolving entities ever known. It is this resilience which was of particular interest to me. The same local interactions that exist between viruses and cells drive the deformation of the two components in this architectural system. The ‘cellular’ infrastructure component responds to changes in the ‘viral’ programmatic component and vice versa. Simple local interactions develop a larger global complexity.

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00 03 // Spreading virus simulation 06 // System response to changing environments 09

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01 // Unit type 2 axo 04 // Unit type 2 elevation 07 10

02 // Unit type 3 axo 05 // Unit type 3 elevation 08 // Image of virus spreading through cell cluster 11 // skin of housing unit pulls from superstructure

Urban Infection

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01 04 07 // Cluster - virus & cell components 10 // View from within public zone

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Nidhi Arya

Dubbeldam Studio

Deleuze writes, “The topological forms should inhabit spaces of energetic possibilities, we should design for the future as open ended, and the past and the present as pregnant not only with possibilities which become real, but with virtualities which become actual.”

I intend to put forth this mix of permanence and instability where the intelligence of the system can be seen as its morphological transformation, continuously expanding and symbiotic in nature. A skeletal framework or an

abstract machine which has its own inherent order in the complexity of the urban landscape can aim at homogenizing heterogeneous elements of the city. This framework works as the ‘noumena’. The proposal is not targeted to be an ideal city but an abstract machine which can be seen as a ‘mechanism in process.’ Unlike Disney’s Epcot, it is not like a city under one roof. It can grow as required.

A city is a continuous fabric of many surfaces connected to each other and forming a packed

TOPO-POLIS

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00 03 // Particle based organizational system 06 // Density vs. height gradients 09 // Organizational system for city

network of different tectonics put together. A city functions because it has various components all working together. The abstract machine I intend to propose is a system of different components packed together such that they bind perfectly from edge to edge or surface to surface. These become the building blocks of the city. The framework can in various iterations become structure, enclosure or infrastructure.

Prefabrication of these components will assist in the growth of the city as and when required.

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01 04 // City layout generated from particle system 07 10 // Branching, scaling, multiplying behavior in coral

02 05 08 // Organization of program 11

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The system of aggregation of the components becomes a catalyst in the formulation of the programs. Urban farming becomes one of the important aspects that links the city within itself and to other cities. Taking from the analysis of the dynamic system in which an increase in height increases density, residential colonies can be housed in the denser parts of the city with in-between farms forming public interaction spaces. Schools, agricultural fields, etc. are less dense and remain closer to the ground. If the requirements of the city change, variations can be made by growing or subdividing within the framework.

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Reference: Manuel Delanda, “Deleuze, Diagrams and the Genesis of Form.� ANY 23: 30-33.

00 // Initial organizational study v1 03 // Initial organizational study v2 06 // Initial organizational study v3 09

01 // Aerial view of neighborhood cluster 04 07 // View of living unit from ground 10 // Living unit prototypes

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Topo-polis

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Matt Choot

Dubbeldam Studio

This proposal attempts to critique the very core of urban design practice today in its inherent processes. The very notion of ‘designing’ at the urban scale is problematic and too predeterministic, as urban complexity simply far exceeds the capacity of a single set of planning decisions and rules. The traditional mode of collaboration between architects and urban planners also poses a scalar discrepancy, as their disparate solutions address the same

set of complex problems. Investigating the biological system of the algae reveals a new potential to bridge this discrepancy. All natural systems adhere to systemic coherence, from structure to scale, formation to function, intelligence to performance. The interplay between environmental parameters and the organism’s genotype defines the formation of the natural system’s phenotype through a complex feedback loop. Procedurally generated

GRADIENT GREEN

techniques are devised based on this extracted behavioral logic, yielding a series of juxtaposed conditions that draw a parallel between cellular organization and architecture on the one hand, and colony formation and urban fabric on the other. The morphological differentiations of Coralline Algae specifically demonstrate an intelligence that responds to environmental parameters, demonstrating infinite variations that are responsive to its immediate environment.

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Matt Choot

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02 // Miami 05 // Suburban Open Space 08 11

Gradient Green

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Kittiya Choowanthanapakorn

Dubbeldam Studio

THE WATERNET COMMUNITY

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The Water Net Community is a bottom-up creation system. My proposal is to create a community which is formed by the growth of its basic living units. The basic living unit combines an individual living space and public space. The primary unit formation derives from the research in “Hydrodictyon” or “water net,” the green algae whose behaviors of reproduction bring about the behaviors of the water net community. Five behaviors of water net reproduction are asexual reproduction (edge-connected), cylindrical netforming (acute-angle joints), sexual reproduction (separating and combining), polyhedral-forming (polyface), and germ net-forming (obtuse-angle joints).

Triangles and tetrahedra form the basic components or primary cells of theMitosis water net.

Triangles allow the net to “grow from the edge” and have the potential to interconnect. On the other hand, tetrahedra represent the states of separation and combination. After the process of geometric formation, the resulting primary scaffold represents the five reproductive behaviors of the organism. Then, three secondary scaffolds are extracted from primary one. These scaffolds contain differentiations •Aggregations in size and form, but similarity in angle and Conjugation face. The main surfaces are detached from the component structure, and partly re-attached to create solids and voids. The ways to

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aggregate the secondary scaffolds refer to the organism’s reproduction: mitosis (two identical), conjugation (two different), and polyhedral (more-than-two differentiation). These three types of aggregation have shown the potential to direct growth horizontally, vertically, and multidirectionally. Aggregation by edge-connected components brings about the prototypical living unit, combining individual living space and shared public space. Each prototype aggregates by face-to-face connections, and controls the direction of growth by attaching the basic component. The basic component defines the private living unit, while the more complex and aggregate components define the public space and recreation area. conservation activities, provides space for people to live and learn with nature.

•Aggregations Polyhedra

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Colony Growth = Regular Connection

00 03 // Mitosis / Conjucation / Polyhedra aggregations 06 09 // Variation of aggregations

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Kittiya Choowanthanapakorn

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The Waternet Community

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The Water Net Community is located in the Lake Kissimmee State Park, Florida. The site selection and programmatic organization is inspired by the behavior of the Hydrodictyon.

Lake Kissimmee State Park has an “entropic” environment in which the water net organism reproduces abundantly to form a colony. The Water Net Community therefore connects the park with the local community and surrounding lakes. The structure floats above the ground to preserve the natural topology. In these ways the community combines living with natural conservation activities, provides space for people to live and learn with nature.

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Andrew Haney

Dubbeldam Studio

The project centers on the idea of creating abstract physical representations of a biological system—coral—constructed from individual components that are used generatively. Coral contains an inherent hierarchy of systems composed of a multitude of a relatively simple component that combines to create increasing and varying complexity. Coralline systems create a wide variety of outcomes based on

small changes to the governance of the polyps, the basic components.

In his book on “Emergence,” Steven Johnson describes systems based on relatively unintelligent, or perhaps uninformed, components that combine to create complex and responsive systems. Individual components, Johnson says, may lack awareness of the larger system and should be governed by simple

GENETIC URBANISM

rules. Similarly, the project uses morphologically simple base components, controlled by a simple set of rules, to create complex forms. The components are more or less indifferent to those around them. Instead, they respond to simple variable inputs which determine their position, rotation, and scale. These factors describe a specific “augmentation” to be performed on the base component. In this way the prototype

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is evolved and diversified into a variegated 03 series, each of which is again subjected to the same augmentation. At each stage the results are evaluated by the author in a simple pass/ fail test based on the object’s workability and ability to translate into physical form. As Sanford Kwinter discusses in his essay “Who’s Afraid of Formalism,” the idea of formality in the architecture of an object is not necessarily a determination made from its visual and material incarnation, but rather can be drawn from the process of its conception. Due to the complexity of the base augmentation, the resultant forms contain little or no visual information pertaining to the method from which they were derived. In

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this way the final product of the procedure can be described as formal, in that it is generated using a specific method, inputs and criteria.The simple pass/fail criteria associated with each step of the object is setup so that the procedure produces a large variety “pass” objects. Not all pass objects will be workable into a final design, so different versions of the product are generated. While the process governing the transition between the generative object and architecture has yet to fully be determined, the transition will involve evaluating aspects of the object for areas of density vs. scarcity, which will directly affect the physical form of the final structure.

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00 // Growth simulation / augment 4 + 3B 03 06 // Philadelphia growth simulation 09 // Philadelphia growth simulation

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Genetic Urbanism

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Jun Young Lee

Dubbeldam Studio

MINGLE_MANGLE

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Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interaction. The common rules of emergence include radical novelty, coherence or correlation, a global or macro level, and the production of a dynamic process. Slime mold is a characteristic example. Depending on the amount and type of an available food resource, they change themselves from a single cellular organism to a multi-cellular organism. And the resource distribution networks of slime mold play a crucial role at all scales. Within an individual organism, cells receive nutrients and expel waste. Nutrients must be transported from a source to all cells efficiently. This drives the 03

system to create efficient resource distribution networks.

In order to instrumentalize the slime mold system (related to swarm behavior), dynamic tools are used under the setting of both internal and external conditions. Behaviors of separation, alignment, and cohesion pertain to the internal condition. The placing of attractors and obstacles, on the other hand, pertains to the external condition. I attempted to decipher the cellular hierarchy by tracing each cell’s movement. While porosity of geometry is determined by obstacles in the case of slime mold, in the urban realm it has favorable effects.

Porous structure allows for three-dimensional 04

connection between existing places and new infrastructure. The housing component makes use of the same logic. Each strand determines the structure of a basic housing component.

The aggregations of these housing cells are placed on areas of selected porosity levels.

The infrastructure made by analysis of swarm behavior connects these housing components, and creates vertical connections and a promenade.

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making ceLL Structure

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making ceLL Structure

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Jun Young Lee

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reSource DiStriBution networkS PLaY a cruciaL roLe at aLL ScaLeS oF BioLogicaL anD artiFiciaL SYStemS. within an inDiviDuaL organiSm, ceLLS receive nutrientS anD exPeL waSte. nutrientS muSt Be tranSPorteD From a Source to aLL ceLLS eFFicientLY. SimiLarLY, waSte muSt Be coLLecteD From everY ceLL anD tranSPorteD out oF the organiSm. communitieS oF organiSmS anD entire ecoSYStemS have the Same requirementS anD naturaL SeLection DriveS the SYStem to create eFFicient reSource DiStriBution networkS.

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Mingle_Mangle

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Seongbeom Mo

Dubbeldam Studio

An animal colony is an integrated autonomous biological system, a group of organisms of one species that live and interact closely with each other. An urban colony for the near future would be an urban-scale housing system that has capabilities to generate form as a selfsufficient social entity. Qualitative structural differentiations generate systematic complexity and flexibility, which allow the system to integrate not only within itself but also with existing urban

conditions.

The organizational logic in Maya “hair dynamics� generates autonomous urban configurations shaped by factors such as density, flow, and program. By adapting dynamic forces and fields into the organization, an individual hair system becomes a nonlinear network organization that has excessive differentiations of quality.

Different components are mapped according

URBAN COLONY

to the distribution and organization of program.

Local interactions among components affect not only the components themselves, but ultimately the whole system as well. Specific morphological mutations and transformations strengthen the network of organization, create diversity in housing unit types, and imbue the architecture with the potential to become landscape, public spaces, and infrastructure.

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ORGANIZATION : Merged Hair Structure

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Jacque Fresco

www.thevenusproject.com

TOTAL CITY SYSTEMS

It would be far easier and would require less energy to build new, efficient cities than to attempt to update and solve the problems of the old ones. The Venus Project proposes a Research City that would use the most sophisticated available resources and construction techniques. Its geometrically elegant and efficient circular arrangement will be surrounded by, and incorporated into the city design, parks and lovely gardens. This city will be designed to operate with the minimum expenditure of energy using the cleanest technology available, which will be in harmony with nature to obtain the highest possible standard of living for everyone. This system facilitates efficient transportation for city residents, eliminating the need for automobiles. The Venus Project’s Circular City arrangement is comprised of the following:

1. The central dome or theme center will house the core of the cybernated system, educational facilities, access center, computerized communications networking systems, health and child care facilities.

2. The buildings surrounding the central dome provide the community with centers for cultural activities such as the arts, theater, exhibitions, concerts, access centers, and various forms of entertainment.

3. Next is the design and development complex for this research and planning city. The design centers are beautifully landscaped in natural surroundings.

4. Adjacent the research facilities are dining and other amenities.

5. The eight residential districts have a variety of free form unique architecture to fulfil the various needs of the occupant. Each home is immersed in lovely gardens isolating one from another with lush landscaping.

6. Areas are set aside for renewable clean sources of energy such as wind generators, solar, heat concentrating systems, geothermal, photovoltaic and others.

7. Next are the indoor hydroponic facilities and outdoor agricultural belts which will be used to grow a wide variety of organic plants without the use of pesticides.

8. A circular waterway for irrigation and filtration surrounds the agricultural belt.

9. The outermost perimeter is utilized for recreational activities such as biking, golfing, hiking and riding, etc.

All the facilities are available to everyone without cost in a resource based economy. The sole purpose of this sophisticated technology is to free people from boring monotonous tasks, make available a much higher standard of living, and provide more leisure time.

With an opportunity for constant growth and achievement people could have the time and freedom to choose the lifestyle they find most fulfilling. The city is designed to serve the needs of every member of society.

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Jacque Fresco

Cybernated Government We are fast approaching a time when human intelligence will be incapable of interacting with the rapidly occurring events in the physical world. The human mind is far too simple to handle and put to practical use the voluminous information needed to operate a highly technical and advanced world society. The processing required would have to deal with trillions of bits of information per second, far too complex for human systems, particularly with the infusion of nanotechnology.

The Venus Project calls for a cybernated society in which computers could replace the outmoded system of electing politicians that in most cases represent the entrenched vested interests. This new technology will not dictate or monitor individual’s lives, as in The Venus Project this would be consider socially offensive and counterproductive. Books such as 1984 and Brave New World, and motion pictures such as Blade-Runner and Terminator 2 have spawned fear in some people regarding the takeover of technology in our society. The Venus Project’s only purpose is to elevate the spiritual and intellectual potential of all people, while at the same time providing the goods and services that will meet their individual and material needs.

Cybernation is the linking of computers with automated systems. Eventually the central cybernated systems will coordinate all of the machinery and equipment that serve the entire city, the nation and ultimately the world. One can think of this as an electronic autonomic nervous system extending into all areas of the social complex.

For example, in the agricultural belt the computers could automatically monitor and maintain the water table, soil chemistry, and coordinate the planting and harvesting of crops. In the residential sector, the system could maintain environmental cleanliness and the recycling of waste materials.

In addition, to ensure the efficient operation of the city’s various functions, all of the processes and services could be equipped with electronic environmental feedback sensors. These sensors could be coordinated with redundant, back-up systems that could operate in the event of failure or breakdown of the city’s primary systems.

Eventually, only when cybernation is integrated into all aspects of this new and dynamic culture can computers appropriately serve the needs of all people. No technological civilization can ever operate efficiently and effectively without the integration of cybernetics as an integral part of this new world civilization.

These proposals, from an engineering standpoint, seem fantastic and unfeasible within the present monetary system; and they are. The sums involved in ventures of this magnitude would be too huge and inconceivable. No government today can possible afford this prodigious undertaking. All of this could only be accomplished in a resource-based world economy where all of the world’s resources are held as the common heritage of all of the earth’s peoples.

Total City Systems

University of Global Resource Management This University of Global Resource Management and Environmental Studies, or “world-university,” is a testing ground for each phase of development. This would be a dynamic, continually evolving research institute open to all of society. Student performance would be based on “competence accreditation,” and research findings would be periodically applied directly to the social structure to benefit all members of the world society.

People will live in these experimental cities and provide feedback on the liability and serviceability of the various structures. This information would be used to formulate modifications to structures so that maximum efficiency, comfort, and safety is assured. This facility is also used to develop modular construction systems and components that can be installed to serve a wide range of needs and preferences. In most instances, the external appearance of the buildings will reflect the function of the building - they are designed “from the inside out.”

Skyscraper These skyscrapers would be constructed of reinforced and pre-stressed concrete, steel and glass.

They will be stabilized against earthquakes and high winds by three massive, elongated, tapered columns. These support structures will surround the cylindrical central tower, which is 150 feet wide. This tripod-like structure is reinforced to diminish compression, tension, and torsion stresses.

These super-size skyscrapers will assure that more land will be available for parks and wilderness preserves, while concurrently helping to eliminate urban sprawl. Each one of these towers will be a total enclosure system containing a shopping center, as well as childcare, educational, health, and recreational facilities. This will help alleviate the need to travel to outside facilities.

If we do not maintain a balance between the population and the earth’s carrying capacity we may have to move our cities not only skyward and seaward, but subterranean as well.

Subterranean Cities In-hospitable regions of the planet, such as polar and desert regions, cities below the surface of the earth would become an entirely comfortable home for many. Numerous elevators allow residents to enjoy skiing and other recreational activities on the surface. The primary source of power for these cities, where feasible, would be geo-thermal energy.

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Jieyu Pu

Dubbeldam Studio

This project is based on research of the biological system of the hydroid polyp. The behaviors of the biological system and the dynamic relationship between polyps and the physical environment suggest an innovative form of future city which consists of intelligent components. The imagined utopian city is more organic and system-driven, affected by both internal organizational logic and external parameters, and with an affective formation

that could interact with the surrounding environment. Advanced generative techniques are used to achieve sequential variations in form and density, gradient changes in quantity and quality, threshold conditions of decay and transformation, and also an aesthetic of complexity and sophistication.

The formation of hydra polyps in the water can be individual or in a colony. Individual polyps reproduce both sexually and asexually through

a budding process. The distinctive behaviors and various morphologies of hydra colonies are determined by environmental parameters such as light, turbulence or temperature. Singlescaffold design and the connection logic of the scaffold are derived from four distinct behaviors.

(1) the lace-like three-dimensional type, (2) the net-like three-dimensional type, (3) the box-like three-dimensional type, and (4) the encrusted two-dimensional type. By studying various ways of connecting the intelligent components and scale changes, we achieved sequential variation and qualitative change from the two-threshold conditions. An additional realization was the potential of developing into urban living units and urban landscape.

The site for the utopian city is on the bay of North Palm Beach, Florida. The bay is very long and with rarely any connections between both sides. The aim is not only to provide connections from the city to the beach, but also to become a new urban landscape and infrastructure network. Outside parameters include open spaces, possible routes and nodes of different hierarchies, and also the density distribution based on the nodes in the existing city. The city is composed of smart components, different types of living units, and continuous landscape in the center of the bay.

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Jeff Palitsch

Dubbeldam Studio

The concept for this project was to develop an intelligent, generative system through an investigation of the local-to-global intelligence of cellular slime mold. By studying the cell-tocell communication patterns by which slime mold respond to constantly changing internal and external forces, I created a dynamic model that could test this intelligence against an architectural goal. The initial system was built

to develop an empty lot in a typical block of Philadelphia row homes. Spatial intelligence is achieved at a cellular level by unitizing each point of three-dimensional space within the void of the lot, and then linking these units to one another. By attracting the closest cells to an organizational matrix of general architectural goals (such as setback, overhang, or multiheight space), and allowing them to deform a

GENERATING A NEW URBANISM

given architectural body, a scaffold for a purely generative building was developed. Ultimately the process led to an investigation of the system at the macro scale. This design for a new urban environment in the vicinity of Florida’s Fort Meyers beach is defined by the proximity of programming, high-density housing, and more efficient transportation.

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Jeff Palitsch

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Qiao Song

Dubbeldam Studio

NESTED NEIGHBORHOODS

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Coral is one of the most prevalent creatures in the world, so I am curious about its interesting behaviors. There is a communication web in the whole system. Each branch detects changes in water turbulence, nutrient availability, and illumination to direct its rate and trajectory of growth and maintain its position relative to other branches. To achieve this, they use a communications system which is fashioned by hormonal and electrochemical communications.

Communication webs nest one inside the other.

Each level of intercommunication has its own interval of awareness with events requiring longer intervals as the communication webs

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become more complex. In this way, each individual cell intercommunicates with the entire community of cells and the physical surroundings to make up a multi-cellular being.

So I create an animation based on the analysis of coral’s behavior in Maya particles, from which we can see that the inner structure of the particles changes according to different relationships such as rebuilding, detecting and nesting. Then I translate these particles to a surface which maintain the quality of these conditions and place them where we have parks, connections and housings as occupyable structures.

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Qiao Song

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Nested Neighborhoods

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Kadambari Srinivasan

Dubbeldam Studio

In recent years there has been a growing debate in the design realm in pitching the top down approach against the bottom-up approach towards coining efficient design solutions.

While a top down approach seems more organized and efficient at first glance a bottom up approach penetrates the deepest depths of organization in a system by embracing the clear advantage of discarding the chain of command that complicates the mechanics of a system.

The theory of ‘Emergence’ by Johnson clearly encourages a ‘local’ approach thus turning down the existence of an overall system in regulating system dynamics, instead celebrating the power of collective intelligence derived as a result of immediate interactions between adjacent components of a system. Contrary to the ‘global’ being the dominant player, this causes the local to generate the global thus strongly tying the system at its lowest tier where a centralized system may never penetrate.

The ‘local’ approach encouraging development through aggregation of parts is also a key player in inspiring how our future habitats may be tweaked for optimal performance which in turn may be inspired by studying biological ecosystems at work since a human habitat is a monitored urban system mimicking an emergent ecosystem on a smaller scale. An ideal habitat should in all ways function with the same precision of an ecosystem by developing its component parts and allowing them to grow react and respond thereby developing and adopting an optimized state at every stage resulting in a fully developed molecule that has the opportunity to learn as it grows.

In accordance with Johnson’s analysis and keeping in mind the urban context that the studio is driven towards I would agree that as component parts become more complicated the more unreliable the system becomes and its aggregation loses control making a

complex meaningless chain of components that eventually self destruct their own organization.

Developing simple and efficient components and combining them in logical progressions is one way of attempting to develop a fundamentally strong system.

To be mentioned also is that it is the amount of aggregation that plays the most important deciding factor in deciding the fate of a successful component. A perfectly pure component may fail if its aggregation scale is incorrectly estimated.

Estimating an aggregation scale in context to an urban habitat requires an analysis of its function, what it caters to and most importantly the number of human being who will occupy it and form a network of direct or indirect interaction to ensure the system grows and learns from its occupants thus pushing the prototype of an emergent habitat to its most inert state.

However, while following these emergent algorithms to generate the design I strongly feel that one must also bear in mind that being an inhabitable space user experience and sensory perception are necessities that will flavor the logical behavior of a designed component.

Quality of surface, space and meshes are the details that separate the designed habitat from a mathematically perfect urban model and it is here that emergence has to tie in with architectural vision that we as designers have to direct our innovation efforts towards. One more thing to be wary of as a designer is that the system should never be driven to complete perfection and sophistication that there is no room for random occurrences which may shape more successful states and place the system in a flux instead of a predetermined equilibrium state. These factors I have expanded on here are probably the most important design decisions that have influenced or will influence the development of my proposal for a future city at both the

BIOTIC HABITATION

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component level and the urban scale at any point of time given the contextual circumstances of the way our present cities have been established and performed.habitat.Directing the project towards developing a component sophisticated enough to function holistically yet not so inert that it becomes a rigid sculpture in a sea of components, acknowledging the need to leave room for ‘humanizing’ the space, using multiple components that interact directly in some instances and indirectly in certain others, logical aggregation that is fused with design qualities, exploring the qualities possessed by the component in its various existential states and programmatic flexibility to whatever extent 09

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possible are some concepts that I expect the next stage of the project to move towards thus adhering to the rules of natural emergence that has time and again proved to be the most effective system we are aware of, at the same time adding the element of design innovation to push the concept of human dwelling into the next version of an urban habitat.

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Biotic Habitation

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Ana Untiveros

Dubbeldam Studio

SPONGIOUS CITY

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Studying sponges and the mechanics of their yet they intrinsically depend on one another. phylum, I have extracted certain behaviors or Different organizational “bones” nevertheless characteristics of intelligence that would be are part of an abstract machine with rules. They useful if not vital in a more biologically infused have the a coherence of a whole without a rigid city planning discipline. system. I am especially interested in advancing From very simple components, the sponge is this idea of how a system precede and inform able toStructure/ organize itself in micro structural formations, another in a heightened formation (bone = lines, Fused Fused Fused Structure/ Structure/ micro micro to to macro to macro macro able to achieve volume and a critical size, and porocyte = surface, flagellate = continuous able to support the other specialized cell layers three-dimensional space). which cooperatively give rise to the entity of Rhizomatic behavior, a blurry line between the sponge. This behavior is of interest to the growth and reproduction, is the strategy in which project because it implies that each system that sponges colonize space. This intelligent form of is being developed in itself has the seeds of the spatial expansion has the potential to include next system to come. Spicule bone cells and factors that determine limits and opportunities outer porocyte flagellated cells differ greatly, embedded in the logic of rhizomatic growth.

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Specialized

Sponge city grows on specified sediment conditions, not in a proverbial ‘tabula rasa’.

Inhabitation therefore necessitates the mapping of favorable growing conditions. Similarly, human cities can grow more intelligently, more strongly, on ground that is apt for their support and survival.

In its individual parts a sponge tends toward the elementary. But as a whole it is a complex and precise machine or assemblage with an emergent identity. With respect to cities, atomized components interact locally, giving rise to cooperation (voluntary and involuntary) not unlike an organism. The health of an organism as well as the city depends on such 05

cells / abstract section

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Porocytes

porous cell

to allow fluid in

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Piracocytes

porous cell to keep fluid out

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Choamocytes

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flagellated cells that arrest or promote currents

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one loop Amoebocytes

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synthesizers of spicules

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ogically rich in its nditions. What could be rimental factor for opment, is for the irregular territory for eration..

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Spongious City

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interactions. Humans possessing will-power and self-consciousness engage in much more complex relationship than those of a cell with a limited range of DNA-commanded instructions.

Nevertheless the advantage of the sponge city is the freedom, arising from spontaneous cooperation, to morph components and overall development at several points in its sponginous life. Inhabitants would be able to physically manifest change in their built environment, and to inhabit the bones with changing cell structures that aggregate and grow in organized condensation rather than careless sprawling.

The ability to cope is the intelligence of adaptation that is innate to living organisms. It is also germane to systems of inert matter that engage in intelligent behaviors. Specifically I am interested in the sponge’s mechanical and chemical response to pollution, which activates or deactivates flagella that regulate the membrane and the absorption of external material. In this way pollution is another nutrient, just one of a much more controlled and specific intake. The nature of the materiality of a sponginous city allows this system to be inlaid within, to allow every part to relay a dynamic response to a threatening or a periodic stimulus.

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Ferda Kolatan

UTOPIA UPGRADED ...our fascinating intricate movings are trapped in soggen brown packets all hidden all art and front, no bone no love.

-David Greene, Archigram 1

Housing projects are personal. More than any other architectural program, they tend to invoke in us a conflicting sense of individualized expression and protective conformity. Age-old habits born out of necessity and fear have long calcified into regimens of dwelling- static, repetitive, and fortified. Under the guise of “functionality” an endless loop of reiterations takes place, each providing little deviation from the original modes of dwelling and instead, further strengthening the roots of what we have come to believe to be the essential qualities of a home. While we more readily accept experiment and adventure in public buildings (the ones we can leave at will), we instinctively fall back on qualities that are familiar, not strange, when it comes to our private domain. And yet, within this seemingly secure realm we constantly seek out opportunities to distinguish ourselves from our neighbors. With every extravagant piece of furniture, exotic wallpaper, or any other subtle domestic maneuver, we hope to demonstrate a spirit of individuation.

This conflict becomes particularly amplified vis-à-vis questions concerning technology. While we embrace any technological innovation as long as it comes packaged as refrigerators, stoves, and other appliances, we usually resist architectural expressions that are generated through contemporary technologies. When it comes to our home, we prefer technology to be performative and invisible (behind walls, floors, and ceilings) or objectified and pretty (TV’s and toasters). We freely accept that technological progress in products needs to be reflected through formal and aesthetic facelifts, not because we crave variation, but because we intuitively understand the fundamental link between innovation and image. A novel idea requires an adequate expression, one that reveals in part the hidden principles through which it was formed but also creates curiosity, and ultimately a desire for the materialization of the idea itself.

So, what are the adequate images that exemplify our times and ideas? Is their relationship to technology derivative, representational, practical or generative? Can housing in particular benefit from a new material identity? It is within this context that the students engaged the studio topic of a contemporary, residential utopia. The focus was not directly geared towards agendas of sociopolitical or societal change heralded by new technologies but rather towards questions of identity and individuality emerging alongside novel forms of computational expression. Design strategies were developed to investigate parametric and nonlinear methodologies with the aim to show an intricate coalescing between dynamic processes of organization and new formations of (design) character.

Static and pre-conceived models of design were substituted by fluid, rhythmic, and adaptive ones.

Familiar modalities of hierarchical planning and ordering were challenged by feedback-based, multidirectional tactics.

In architecture history the notion of utopia plays an essential role. Each generation of architects, unwittingly or deliberately, formulates their unique vision of an ideal place. Some of these display ambitions of totality and novelty while others propagate concepts of integration and refinement.

Again others define their position through rejection of the very premise of ideality. The work in this studio reflects each student’s personal contention with both the relevance as well as the meaning of a contemporary utopia. Furthermore, it engages sophisticated computational techniques of organization and form-making in an attempt to not only break with antiquated design conventions and programmatic routines, but also to articulate an authentic manifestation of present design culture.

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Mehdi Alibakhshian

Kolatan Studio

FLUID MOTION

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Contemporary avant-garde architecture and urbanism seek to address this societal demand via a rich panoply of parametric design techniques. However, what confront us is a new style rather than merely a new set of techniques.

The techniques in question, the employment of animation, simulation and form finding tools—as well as parametric modeling and scripting— have inspired a new collective movement with radically new ambitions and values. - Patrik Schumacher Seeking an innovative architectural approach to the scale of daily life, I took natural behaviors, gestures, actions and reactions as a starting point. The study of mushroom evolution, maturation and behavior served as the basis for a parallel definition of software-based design methods. There is moment in the mushroom maturation cycle in which the mushroom cracks to extend its umbrella form. Parametric designs investigate and translate this and other moments through the actions of surfaces, lines or even volume.

In the early stages, investigation through dynamic systems produced some formal moments that could potentially define

configurations at the scale of housing units or the urban fabric. However, this is not just a matter of top-down design methodology.

Bottom-up imagination from the specific spaces is necessary for the final refinement of our housing project. After generating numerous iterations through repetition, we followed an evolutionary shift to the Möbius strip, which posed some functional challenges in their connections. Distancing ourselves a bit from the accidental aspects of parametric design, we played with surfaces to connect interior and exterior spaces. The next step in this scale was to abstract the Möbius strip, keeping its quality and performance while disturbing its symbolic appearance.

What the dynamic system and its developing forces brought to the project was a loop which defines a residential neighbor around itself.

Through this dynamic loop, the feedback of laminating and delaminating curving surfaces produces variation through the path. As the viewer/habitant moves through, six to 12 housing units to take shape on both sides of the passage. Therefore, apart from the program, the vertical appearance of surfaces becomes

horizontal through the act of circulation. The horizontal moments are understood as the potential mixing with the surrounding landscape, dissolving the object and providing a sense of inner unity.

Determining the right kind of site for the project involves analyzing its looping, laminated curves. Because of its steep loop, it is most suitable for steep terrain, such as a face-to-face hill or steep beaches. The final aspect was to define a housing unit that reflects the quality of dynamic, growing system overall. Therefore we applied circular holes which define openings, illumination, connections, and access to the interior. These holes create texture and dynamic surfaces which extend the project into the surrounding context.

Reference: Schumacher, Patrik. “A New Global Style in Architecture and Urban Design.”

Architectural Design Digital Cities. Vol. 79 no. 4.

John Wiley & Son Ltd, 2009. 14-23, 15.

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Fluid Motion

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Jacob Chandler

Kolatan Studio

Mainstream Floridian living attempts to conquer the tropical frontier through traditional suburban thought and settlement - an intense task for as daunting a landscape as Florida’s. Development is done largely through anti-adaptation: recreating a more economically suitable version of nature by inserting the distribution efficiencies of the cul-de-sac into a unique and already welldistributed estuary landscape. This recreation of nature may in some sense preserves the “tropical frontier�, yet it is also inefficient and

heedless of what Florida has to offer. The Swamp Suburb provides an alternative. In an increasingly connected world, the physicality of infrastructure becomes less and less imposing, yet remains the sole physical form of settlement.

This is most evident in satellite images of new developments, with sewers and roads without houses. By providing a non-branching infrastructural system across the natural terrain of a tidal estuary, settlement can become the result of the Floridian tropical frontier and not

the planned grid. Accessible primarily by boat, each unit stands on legs above the tidal waters.

This situation is unusual but not unreasonable in our technology-savvy world, with docks already available at nearby retail centers. The infrastructural core of each house is developed first and contains the necessary utilities. As lots are sold based on location, view, and exclusivity, the inhabitants build upon the cores. Each one is equal, yet able to accommodate the wide range of middle-class housing requirements.

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SWAMP SUBURB

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Jacob Chandler

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Yao Chen

NON-LINEAR UTOPIA Over the past decade, theories of nonlinear systems have changed the way we see the world. A nonlinear system is not a creation, but an approach to diverse fields such as history, culture, economics, and art. It is a complex system that relates to chaos theory and has a basis in material reality. In terms of architecture, how can we translate this theory into a nonlinear design method?

Unlike a linear equation that is defined by specific parameters whose results are predictable, the nonlinear dynamic system is very difficult to model analytically. Multiple attractors and outcomes mutually affect each other. Representing more than the sum of their parts, emergent properties have more complexity and systematicity. Architecture presents a static moment in a dynamic process demonstrating the combination of modern aesthetics, science, and philosophy. The value of architectural shape or form is that it represents methods, or a diagram of fundamental resonance accumulated into figures of order.

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Our project follows the discipline of top-down process rather than bottom-up simulations.

The architecture is generated from the wellcontrolled particle system and develops by introducing several other control systems. The whole is broken into parts in order to manifest more properties. As for bottom-up progress, we created a very simple component and made thousands of them in order to observe what happens when it becomes a mass. This follows Johnson’s theory of emergence that “more is different,” enabling us to observe the complexity of global behavior. In terms of techniques we are using no matter scripting (Monkey), flow diagram (Grasshopper) or particle dynamic system (Maya). What we are searching for is the multiple consequences that happen during the processes rather than a specific form generated from initial ideas.

What does “intelligent component” mean? It does not only add complexity into the system.

Simply “adding up the components will fail to capture any property that emerged from complex

interactions, since the effect of the latter may be multiplicative and not just additive.” While traditional architectural components serve only as structural supports, intelligent components developed within the dynamic system may have effects beyond the structure, influencing functional, morphological, and material systems as well.

Architects choose ways to manifest dynamic material reality in terms of structure, function, material, and spatial psychology as well as their coexistences and interactions. At this level, architecture serves as a vector which represents the condensed essence of how human beings think of the world.

References DeLanda, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone, 1997, 17.

Johnson, Steven. Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner, 2001, 78.

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Yao Chen

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Non-Linear Utopia

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Florina Dutt

Kolatan Studio

The design studio looks into the interface where social engineering and new modes of production methods meet. The design intervention lies in rethinking a building being composed of mass-customized “generative components” that comes from the formal variation in the generative design process. This would also transform the present prefabrication technique which stands as pure repetition of standardized elements.

I have looked into the organic system of coccolithophores as design inspiration.

Coccoliths are photosynthesizing, singlecelled algae covered with calcium carbonates.

The complexity of this bio-form lies in several characteristics. The micro level consists of the pattern formation of the calcium carbonate shells and the macro level involves the amorphous aggregation strategies. My design process

involved the study of variation through shapes of different types of coccoliths (Calciosolena) in the micro level. The overall aggregation strategy was simulated with the particle system acted upon by controlled force fields. This concept design is further augmented through tests of recursive processes with the simple forms, followed by the logistics of formal variation.

The site selected for the project is in Tampa, Florida, located between existing mixedtype, large-scale housing settlements where appreciable expansion is available to apply the design onto a valid urban scheme at mega-scale. The site is also well connected to neighboring urban realms. Due to limited land availability in the inner city area, the chosen site is closer to sea, even though the site does not directly open up into the sea.

COCCOLITHS

Coccolithophores: The peculiar, and beautif their possession of calcium carbonate plate cell.

Florina Dutt | University of Penn sylvania

genereration of the study model

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The structure grew with the concept of the interplay between the specificities of an external layer that constitutes the structural system and the internal layer that serves as the living spaces. The former holds the faรงade system and forms the direct mediator to the external environment, while the latter provides spatial complexities. The global aggregation of the units unified these complexities between the units. The interstitial spaces thereby created acted as open or partially open for either private use or public gathering and communication with nature. The system grew vertically into towers, yet it also had variation of densities with units arranged differently at each level. Large-scale recreation and community spaces include landscape structures at the base of these towers. They function as commercial plazas as well as parking areas.

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Chun Fang

Kolatan Studio

FABRICATED SURFACE This project starts with the particle system, which indicates a dynamic way of expanding from a flat surface into a fabricated system.

The whole system shows different situations of density, which forms various spaces inside and outside. This dynamic system includes skins and structures, and illustrates a smooth change in the fabrication of architecture. Users would treat this not only as constructed object but also as an integral enhancement of the site.

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Jisu Han

Kolatan Studio

DYNAMIC FLOW

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Dynamic Flow is a proposal for a beach housing community. The design process began with analyzing and modeling the dynamic forces involved in the formation of a volcanic region.

Each building has a number of private rooms as well as open public space. Rooms occupy the upper interior levels, while the open space is located on the ground and first floor. This open space is composed of a hall for performances and a large playground, inviting the participation of residents and beach users. The program is distributed and harmonized within the form of the wave derived from the flow analysis. On one side of each unit is a private beach for residents.

A public stretch of beach—open to anyone

who wishes to use it—serves as connector.

This structure on the main beach is a cultural attraction creating new beach activities.

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Jisu Han

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Dynamic Flow

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Danielle Rivera

Kolatan Studio

The American model for suburbia has changed little since its inception at Levittown, Pennsylvania. Cul-de-sacs, consistently doubleloaded streets, megamarts, parking lots, and classical symbolism run rampant in these outdated communities. From the sky, they are reminiscent of alien crop circles, devouring natural habitat and superimposing contrived patterns upon the ground. The suburban home is a reckless consumer—squandering massive amounts of energy and money. Most of this squandering occurs during the creation of the 03 infrastructure needed to support these satellite settlements. Each unit is wholly dependent upon its infrastructural umbilical cord, unable to support its own surroundings or itself.

The suburban model must be re-examined.

Current suburban architecture is hypocritical, oftentimes embedding classical elements into poorly made modern shells. As human settlements continue to expand and older suburban neighborhoods begin to deteriorate, a new architectural language is needed.

The new suburban architectural language will be virtually imperceptible from the sky, marrying human systems with local ecosystems.

Instead of deploying thin, dumb shells, the new architectural language stresses a thick, sited shell that provides energy, water, information, storage, and most importantly independence.

The new ability to grow supports the dynamics of suburban life. As the structure is incrementally

expanded, the building layers upon itself, leaving previous inner shells to retain infrastructure and mechanicals. New technologies can reside within more recently constructed layers.

The structure and facade are light in weight, implying the dynamism of the interior conditions.

The independent units integrate into their immediate context by adopting its language, weaving and mingling with the palette of its surrounding ecosystem. The façade allows local flora and fauna to inhabit it, while simultaneously collecting solar energy and rainwater. The resultant structure constantly evolves with its environment. acknowledges the changing needs of its occupants.

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SELF-SUFFICIENT SUBURBIA

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Danielle Rivera

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Self-Sufficient Suburbia

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Cheng Wei Lin

Kolatan Studio

My project is based on two important studies, the dynamic model and the component study.

The dynamic model is based on the particle system, which controlled and interacted with two kinds of force. I set up a series of criteria to test the results of the model. Then I applied this model to three different scales including the overall city, the individual building type, and the building component. This process allowed me

to see how different density conditions were organized, and to utilize the appropriate building types and components.

The component studies originally represented the different densities shown in dynamic model. I set up a series of variations in building components, and enhanced the meaning of these components throughout the process.

I tried programming each component in a

different stage of transformation. For example, a roof might transform into a sun breaker, then into a wall of the building. The two systems that shaped this project share the same logic, but have different meaning and scales. The proposed community represents this dynamic model in building component logic.

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DYNAMIC UTOPIA COMMUNITY

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Cheng Wei Lin

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Dynamic Utopia Community

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Keiko Vuong

Kolatan Studio

DYNAMIC WALL SYSTEM Drawing from the morphodynamic qualities of gravity wave cloud formation, this project explores the potentials of an architectural system which utilizes simple volumes that collectively form a complex configuration. Much like the process in which gravity wave clouds emerge as the residual form of external forces moving across a field, the form of the explored system is shaped by a series of controlled forces applied progressively onto the original form.

Within this process of constant transfiguration, various conditions emerge that carry inherent architectural qualities and implications that are then translated into a concrete form that become the seeds of a residential unit.At the smallest scale, the system is composed of a series of simple rectangular prisms, grid-like and rigid in nature. The volumes create an unintelligent field of uniform blocks. However, with the application of dynamic forces onto the field, the prisms transform as fluid elements. Each volume responds to the global force exerted on the overall field and local forces produced by neighboring prisms. It transfigures in shape and scale to produce a dynamic surface with various qualities of aperture, enclosure, density, and patterning.

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Keiko Vuong

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These varying conditions can be linked to a specific architectural condition or dwelling function. The flowing nature of the form is best manifested in the wall system. It has the ability to fluctuate in aperture from a lacy openness to a solid surface, allowing varying levels of enclosure and illumination. Additionally, this same fluidity enables a free transformation from the landscape, building wall, to the roof; each element of the living unit is derived from the same architectural system, and their boundaries become blurred. The striations created by the system yield opportunities for the interior, as the projections can be used as shelving or benches.

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also add structural integrity. These features of the system give it a multi-functional intelligence.

The flexibility of the wall components also allows for fluid connections between walls. Walls can split to create new walls, and the system is thereby given the ability to grow into a larger community of dwellings. Landscape elements such as retaining walls can additionally be drawn from the transfiguration process of the dynamic form, which will further inform the connections and organization of the dwelling clusters.

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Dynamic Wall System

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Xuedong Wang

Kolatan Studio

THE UNSEPARATED CITY

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Unseparated City focuses on communication and connection. This project is based on the idea that surface and volume can emerge through the accumulation of lines and particle systems which self-organize to achieve landscape, structure and enclosure. By using the bottomup logic of a dynamic system with embedded intelligence, the project achieves biomorphic qualities. Its main goal, however, was to meet certain programmatic requirements using simple recursive processes. Individual housing units are designed from the inside out, focusing on the performance of a core component which combines vital living functions. By connecting individual housing units into a single aggregated structural and technical particle system, other types of connections can simultaneously occur through the core components.

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Ziyue Wei

Kolatan Studio

In this project, we are concerned with developing a novel strategy towards urban and suburban housing based on contemporary means of technology, technique and design sensibility.

Initially I worked to explore ways of building a dynamic and intelligent system. The method

was to make a basic form mutate continuously, thus generating a series of forms with sequential variation. After producing a catalog of forms, I chose several of them which had the most potential to be developed into housing units, attached construction elements to them, and

UTOPIA COMMUNITY finally created several refined housing units.

These housing units can be either set up as individual homes or assembled together to form multi-occupant dwellings.

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Ziyue Wei

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Utopia Community

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Chris Perry

A FEW THOUGHTS ON ARCHITECTURE, TECH N

The incorporation of computer technologies into architecture has been addressed extensively in recent years, with its most familiar application involving the exploration of geometric and formal novelty. For instance, one has seen much attention paid to computer modeling and simulation as a generative and time-based process for design. In this way, architecture has attempted to embrace the cultural and technological forces of mobility that characterize our times. However, while this approach incorporates degrees of temporality into the design process itself, the end results are more often than not static and fixed, reinforcing the notion that architecture is fundamentally a “formal” discipline and one perpetually engaged in the ancient art of monument-making. Furthermore, the discipline’s conception of “monument” seems to have remained relatively fixed as well, to the extent that its expression continues to operate primarily in the realm of physical form, regardless of its nuance and complexity. Of course, it could be argued that this very issue of monumentality is symptomatic of the nature of the discipline and as a result is as pervasive today as it was in the time of classical architecture. Indeed, “time” seems to be a paradoxical condition not only for the architecture of the computer age, but for architecture itself. As was the case with modernism, the discipline today seems charged with the contradictory task of simultaneously moving with as well as suspending time.

As was also the case with modernism, contemporary architecture continues to struggle with the difficult relationship between form and what might be considered the most transient quality of a building, that of the architectural program, or what the modernists referred to as “function.” Indeed what has been less apparent in recent years is the exploration of how computers introduce ideas and qualities of mobility into the very performance of the architecture itself. Extending beyond a strictly formal area of inquiry, this would suggest the incorporation of digital technologies from fields as diverse as pervasive computing, robotics, and interface design directly into buildings as a means of expanding their capacity to adjust and respond over time to their users as well as their external environment. What this provokes is a rethinking along two principle lines of thought. The first regards a consideration of the general relationship between the built environment and technology in which new technologies are not seen as a threat to architecture, in terms of what might be viewed as an inevitable dematerialization of built form, but rather serve to reinforce and augment the physicality of buildings. The second considers the more specific relationship between “form” and “program” in architecture and discourages the assumption that they be limited to a linear relationship in which one always supersedes the other (“form follows function” and vice versa). Furthermore, the notion that program is limited to the implicit determinism inherent in the modernists’ definition of “function,” must be re-imagined and considered instead to be flexible, adaptive, and capable of unpredictability and invention.

H NOLOGY, MONUMENTALITY, AND PROGRAM

However, while it would seem that issues of program offer a way out of monumentality, to the extent that performance presumably eclipses representation when it comes to how a building organizes use, the degree to which a building design is motivated by how it works as opposed to by how it looks has always been a source of intense debate within the discipline. For instance, one is reminded of the 1950s and 1960s when a new generation of architects and thinkers attempted to re-engage issues of architecture and mobility through questions of program. Critical of what they saw as modernism’s betrayal of its original mandate for an architecture of “function” and its return instead to traditional logics of monumental expression, albeit with the new materials of steel and glass, this generation declared a mandate of its own. Calling for architecture to renew its interest in and use of science and technology as a means of exploring its true performative potential, which in some cases suggested the use of moving parts and portable components, this mandate sought to redefine the modernist conception of “function” and conceive a new architecture of temporality. A closer look at the work of this period, however, reveals the vulnerability of such a mandate, especially given the fact that architecture’s role in society seems ambiguously suspended between its definition as a monument for the expression of ideas and a vehicle through which it responds to the needs and desires of its occupants. Indeed, much of the polemical work from the 1950s and 1960s certainly has the appearance of being anti-monumental in that it replaced the fixity of steel and concrete with the temporality of gantry cranes, pneumatic envelopes, and projected imagery. What is less clear is the extent to which this was merely the development of yet another form of monumentality—a monumentality concerned with expressing a period of cultural mobility—or in fact the emergence of a truly performative architecture capable of responding and adapting to the dynamics of use.

Inherent in this question is the larger and more difficult problem as to whether architecture should be understood as a form of art and expression or a form of design and utility, or in some ambiguous way, an integration of the two.

What is clear, however, is that these questions are as relevant today as they were fifty or one hundred years ago, and remain a challenge for yet another architectural generation practicing in an age of significant technological advancement. Not unlike the modernists at the turn of the twentieth century and the generation that followed in the 1950s and 1960s, contemporary architects are equally engaged with the exploration of how the predominant technology of their time, in this case the computer, informs architecture. With this question come the inevitable dilemmas of architecture and temporality, form and program, expression and use. What remains to be seen is whether contemporary architecture will be able to avoid the trappings of these apparent dichotomies.

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Tya Winn

Kolatan Studio

The orientation to new morphogenic processes has made this semester a challenge. The digital organic systems we have created have questioned and repositioned the previous modes of architectural thinking. Tracing the ideas of futurist architecture and drawing inspiration from Jacques Fresco have challenged the manner in which architecture can be derived. Looking to foster a generative design process, the studio began with a study of particle systems based on the interaction of two systems of emitters layered over one another. This action, once attached to a motion path, created a pattern based on movement in two directions; one following the curve of the motion path and the other based on the circuit of the emitter being acted upon by a Newtonian force.

The resulting study yielded several systems that resulted in a field of various abstracted curves. In the adjustment of force magnitude and distance to the operator, these systems either inflated the interior spatial volume or condensed it upon itself. As a result, particles could be influenced to densify or disperse themselves along the path. The expansion and contraction of space occurs across both the X and Y axes.

The second layer of information was the 06 application of an instancer replacement. By mapping a new geometry to the system, new spatial and pattern dynamics could be understood by the way particles moved and changed across the system. The change in scale and rotation cause a perceived shift between a surface-like condition where particles were most dense and began to overlap, and linear elements that were more structural where they begin to spread out in one direction. The relationship in the volume formation led to a concentration of particles along a new curve, creating interesting moments where one curve turned to the other.

The un-instanced geometries had an effect of folding in upon themselves. These created interesting moments of openness and closure that could begin to support program. The array of the instancer across the model had a textured quality in dense moments of overlap that had an internal relationship and logic following the movement of the system, but at the same time produced an innovative form.

In the translation of these findings to become a dwelling for the Florida site, I plan to utilize the curvilinear forms to create a house that can capture the dynamism of the system. It also repositions the idea of domed homes, which have certain advantages in this regional climate. While the dome’s shape and structure offers resistance to high winds, tornadoes, and hurricanes, it is a typology that has yet to be seriously considered or applied to this region.

The openings and closings that arise within the system present numerous architectural opportunities. They can be programmed as modes of egress, connections to other volumes, or glazed openings to allow light filtration and views. The densities concentrated at the bottom of the model follow a certain logic of building and construction, which lighten the load as it moves vertically. This can be interpreted as a structural element that is based in the emergent action of the system. The dispersal of particles along the lateral curves can begin to be re imagined as the structural system for an interior floor system.

Each unit connects with the site along the curves of the exterior shell. In the translation of the individual unit to a cumulative urban proposition, path connections between units reposition the gridded orientation of the common subdivision. The design questions the manner in which people inhabit their communities, and the spatiality of a home. Compounds could be created by closely concentrating homes for a higher related or unrelated community. This type

of flexible and adaptable planning could begin to address the branching modes of settlement that exist in the current reality of family and community modules. Urb Kilombo presents a landscape that is more reflective of the system behavior.

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Jihyoon Yoon

Kolatan Studio

INTERMEDIARY HOUSING

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Inverting the typical understanding of the city, houses are here considered as the inbetween spaces that serve to connect public communication spaces. Houses not only consist of interior private spaces, but also lead residents to communicate with the outside world. This study of “intermediary housing” learns from the behavior of barnacle organisms.

Natural Component: When barnacles occupy territory on rocks, they have to compete with each other for living space. However, they sometimes choose to share their foundation shell.

Dynamic Systems: A digitally coded dynamic system, based on the barnacles’ behavior, creates a changing environment.

As components swell up or sink down, they articulate various kinds of forms and spaces.

Encounters and intersections between mutually affective components are emphasized. A secondary dynamic system is based on the geometry composed of three selected particle layers in order to create architectural spaces.

Structure, Surface: As components undergo

transition, their characteristics are shifted from spatial characteristics to surface characteristics via structural characteristics. The model takes shape as components are put into each of the three particle layers, now joined together.

Program Scheme: Components are flexible and extensible, coming into contact and relationships with external factors. For instance, when components meet water factors, they perform the function of toilet, shower, and kitchen areas. When they meet public space, they act as guest rooms. At the edges of the house, components transition from roof to ground via wall. The outer spaces are public, while the inner core of the house is quite private.

Urban Scheme: The aggregation of housing units creates or implies shared space. The middle of the house is shared by two units.

Each house is located between circular communication spaces, and every two units share communication space. In addition, every six units share public spaces. Thus, the housing facilitates communication in our hectic life.

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Jihyoon Yoon

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Jingyi Zhao

Kolatan Studio

ACTIVATED CONTINUITY

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In a biological system, each cell has its own energy. Vitality is a result of the interaction between the individual cell and the external chemical and physical conditions. In my dynamic system, interaction occurs among all the particles and throughout the system.

When an external force is applied to a given particle, other particles respond simultaneously, forming a continuously active shape. Particles accelerate and shift in different directions in response to concurrent external forces, leading to a unique shape that cannot be formed by a single intentional force.

As Michael Hensel says in Emergence, the process of action is most important. Thus the conception of my proposed city is to record all the snapshots in the morphogenetic process, and then combine them together to form the residential system.

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Jingyi Zhao

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Roland Snooks

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www.kokkugia.com

A NON-LINEAR CHALLENGE TO TECTONICS

This studio concentrated on the development of proto-architectural systems and their non-linear interaction. Architecture has always been dominated by a series of hierarchies that operate within the design process and are manifest within the resultant building. A series of non-linear generative design methodologies were developed to challenge these hierarchies and generate a feedback loop between the various systems that operate within architecture and urban systems.

These non-linear systems are based on either recursive of self-organizing processes that enable design intent to be encoded at a local level. It is through the interaction of these local decisions that a global order emerges. The focus of the studio was to generate either architectural or urban systems such as structure, HVAC, circulation, ornament, and transportation networks and then to look at how these systems could interact with other systems in a non-hierarchical manner. For example instead of seeing ornament as being subservient to structure, these processes would engage ornament and structure in a non-linear negotiation. Consequently the studio was interested in questions of how structure could inform ornament and conversely how ornament could inform structure.

The recursive methodologies explored were developed out of growth algorithms that are primarily based on substitution systems. These morphogenetic operations are capable of generating emergent formations through an internal logic of bottom-up relationships. The other dominant algorithmic strategy was developed from the field of Swarm Intelligence. The underlying algorithms of this approach are multi-agent models. Within these systems, agents interact with their neighbors in a non-linear feedback loop, which self-organizes to generate emergent behavior. These techniques form the basis of a behavioral design methodology.

Two fundamental mechanisms through which agency operates within behavioral design process can be identified as: the agency of architectural matter and the agency that organizes or restructures architectural matter. This difference can be understood through the analogy of social insect behavior. The cooperation of ants in forming chains or bridges is an example of the agent operating as architectural (or structural) matter. Alternatively the formation of termite mounds involves the reorganization of matter by termites through a set of bottom-up rules establishing a relationship between mud, pheromone and the interaction of a population of termites. This is an example of a stigmergic relationship in which the agent reforms architectural matter.

Local positioning of design intent and the complex order generated by behavioral design has significant implications for the nature of hierarchy within architecture. The distributed non-linear operation of swarm systems intrinsically resists the discrete articulation of tectonic hierarchies that dominate Modern architecture and contemporary parametric component assemblies. The bottom-up nature of these systems refocuses tectonic concerns on the assemblage at the micro scale. This is not to suggest that behavioral typologies will involve a complete flattening of hierarchy, however instead of hierarchies being predetermined and based on sequential scales, they can be understood to be an emergent property of a decentralized system.

In compressing the hierarchies of tectonic articulation, swarm systems generate intensive affects that arise from the accretion of high populations of discrete elements forming a cohesive emergent assemblage. This polyscalar assemblage blurs the boundaries between form, structure, and ornament from which a tectonic of continuous matter emerges. This type of tectonic assemblage can be generated from either the negotiation of multiple systems within an ecology or through a single system from which differentiation arises as a response to local conditions.

Liwen Mao

Snooks Studio

NEGOTIABLE HIERARCHY

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This project investigates the relationship between tectonic systems in an attempt to challenge conventional tectonic hierarchies.

More specifically the project examines the relationship between structure and ornament through a multi-agent system. This enables a non-linear negotiation between these two operations and thus questions the typical sequential and dependant nature of these systems within the design process. The multiagent algorithm operates through a form of specialization where agents respond to their context to either generate ornamental or structural geometries. This creates a stigmergic relationship were the two systems interact within

a feedback loop generating a complex mutual engagement.

This project finds potential geometries arising within a system governed by swarm intelligence. Such bottom-up systems can create not only global, complex phenomena, but also unexpected smaller-scale forms that give the designer more localized control within the system.

The examples shown here explore how the geometry interacts with external conditions, as well as how different local rules can influence form.

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Liwen Mao

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Rui Bao

Snooks Studio

URBAN NEGOTIATIONS

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My initial attempt was to design a self-organizing system that could organize complex architectural design. After progressively developing and refining the system, the main system and some of its derivatives were tested both at the architectural and urban scale. The driving force is the self-organizing process of design: not a fixed output but dynamic development.

Studying the idea of reconstruction, I observed and analyzed some defining qualities. (1) Relationships. Forces of alignment, cohesion, separation, and direction. (2) Edges. The radius or edge boundary changes, grows, or mutates in response to different agents. (3) Encroachment.

Transformation and stimulation result from

invading and occupying, carrying and passing the gene.

This research had different implications for different scales. For architecture, the product is a program. What I designed is the agency of geometries and a spatial simulation of the architectural module. The system is composed of different kinds of agents, representing floors (rooms with different functions); structure for both functional support and skin (walls); and public space for communication within each floor and among floors. For the urban scale, the product is an abstract diagram designed to organize the complex urban situation. The system is composed of different agencies of

different domains, such as culture flow, density of buildings, land use, marketing distribution, transportation, communication, and production.

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Rui Bao

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Urban Negotiations

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James Bowman

Snooks Studio

POLYCUBE URBANISM

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“The emergent is unlike its components insofar as these are incommensurable, and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.”

(George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 1875) Polycube Urbanism proposes a new method of architectural design. While the title carries with it implications of large-scale urban structures, the process is scaleless and can lend itself just as well to buildings as small as the single-family home. In this project, an aggregation of polycube components are then eroded from within through a process of self-similar subdivision.

It suggests that one can ‘grow’ a building by determining unit type(s), their spatial relationships, an overall number of units, and a desired density. Public space, circulation and structure are then ‘eroded’ from that form.

However, buildings do not erode and they certainly do not grow in the typical sense of the word. These terms are simply metaphors for both the determination of overall form and the demarcation of public and private space within that form.

The common characteristics of emergent form, according to Jeffrey Goldstein (Adelphi

University School of Business) are: (1) Radical novelty (2) Coherence or correlation (3) A global or macro order (4) It is the product of a dynamical process While the resultant form of the project shown here may not be ‘radically novel’ it is the process that is new. The polycubes and their processes of erosion as used in this study are relatively basic compared to the available possibilities.

Further research needs to be conducted to truly understand and exploit the system.

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Polycube Urbanism

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April Qi Chen

Snooks Studio

This project tries to explore the relationship between public space and private space by employing the cellular automata (CA) system and Isosurf technique. Representing the tower as a series of points or nodes that change their status according to the environment, I randomly input the public spaces and private spaces. These points will look around and survey the neighboring points to see whether the local environment is lacking either in public

or private nodes. Each point then determines and identifies itself as either public or private.

Its status will alter the balance from the point of view of other nearby points, and provoke some of them to alter their status. Ultimately the chain reaction returns back to the original point, which reinvents itself again and again. The overall system thus creates a richly dynamic space.

NEGOTIABLE PUBLICITY

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Negotiable Publicity

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Emaan Farhoud

Snooks Studio

STRUCTURE, ENCLOSURE & URBAN FIBROSITY

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My research interests are based on the concept that simplicity can generate complexity—how objects, behaviors and rules can produce unpredictable, yet ordered forms that are architecturally relevant. More specifically I am focusing on the ways in which aggregation growth logic and behavioral agency can inform new ways of considering two critical architectural systems: structure and enclosure.

Through earlier studies of simple componentry and their ability to branch, I have looked at the way relationships between size, angle, and rotation can create structural models with the ability to self-scale and group into coherent structural forms.

From here, I became interested in the addition of an enclosure system to my initial structural investigations, and how these two systems could be integrated into a coherent whole. I was also interested in the notion of fibrosity, looking at things such as Frei Otto’s string studies, web structures and biological organizations; and how the accumulation of many strand-like elements could result in emergent surface properties. With these in mind, I shifted to a technique of agency.

Here intelligent behaviors could be embedded into lines, allowing them to self-organize into different functions while maintaining a cohesive relationship. By moving to a line-based system, using the growth logic from my earlier structural

studies, and adding additional attractor-based logic, I have worked to develop a methodology where structural logic informs fibrous-like enclosures with unique spatial and aesthetic qualities.

With regard to the discourse of this studio, I am interested in the ways in which selforganizing systems can become a catalyst in adding density, connectivity, and reinvention to existing urban infrastructure. By considering the historical relationship that US cities have had with water (typically for transportation and industry needs), I believe there is an opportunity to create a new physical context for architecture.

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01 04 // Velocity variations 07 // Velocity = 0.3 10 // Velocity = 1.2

02 05 // Range of vision variations 08 // Range of vision = 3 11 // Range of vision = 12

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01 // String experiment #2 04 07 // String experiment #5 10 // String experiment #3

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Hye Seung Lee

Snooks Studio

OSMOSIS URBAN ORNAMENT

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Throughout the semester, I looked into swarm intelligence systems. In this type of system, each agent moves only by its respective internal rule, reacting to outside conditions classified as attractors and anti-attractors. I applied this concept to existing urban spaces and evaluated its possibility for making ornamental elements in a larger scale.

My idea was to make a kind of urban ornamental infrastructure using swarm intelligence. In any urban area, there are various physical elements such as buildings, roads, open spaces, and infrastructure. Looking beyond the architecture

of buildings themselves—which occupy most of the urban area and dominate the urban fabric—I wanted to generate secondary elements that react to existing urban conditions.

The movement of agents translates into concrete occupations of space. As a design strategy, I selected a site to apply the system and make a linear movement based on the existing condition. The movement of agents creates linear urban furniture such as benches, corridors, and bridges that respond to urban conditions.

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Hye Seung Lee 01

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Osmosis Urban Ornament

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Marta Mackiewicz

Snooks Studio

The focus of this research is the study of the agency of structure and ornament. Through a series of specified tests, the characteristics distinctive of each category were narrowed down and pushed to their logical extremes. I chose to focus on the scale of an inhabitable space, that of a room or interior of a building, and to apply this research to a traditional ceiling and column system. Originally beginning with an aggregation system, I found it to be too limiting and dense to

create any usable form, and thus progressed to analyzing structural and ornamental behaviors through agency. Extensive experimentation resulted in a series of identifiable behaviors produced through interactions with surface, edge, and node conditions. The intelligence built into each system determines the logic it follows when encountering these spatial states and demonstrates its ability to create an emergent system through local interactions.

AGENCY OF STRUCTURE AND ORNAMENT

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Recursive_Agent_ _Recursive_Agent_ tnegA_evisruceR Detail _tneRandom_Grid_Column_Surface_Structure_Ornament_ manrO_erutcurtS_ecafruS_nmuloC_dirG_modnaR Random_Grid_Column_Surface_Structure_Ornament_ Component_Growth/Death Component_Growth/Death

htaeD/htworG_tnenopmoC

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00 03 // Details 06 // Multi-strand surface testing 09 // Multi-strand surface testing

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01 04 // Details 07 // Multi-strand surface testing 10 // Multi-strand surface testing

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02 05 // Details 08 // Multi-strand surface testing 11 // Multi-strand surface testing

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Marta Mackiewicz

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Agency of Structure and Ornament

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Detail

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Changsoon Park

Snooks Studio

The city is made up of diverse scale factors ranging from humans to skyscrapers. To design on the urban scale, we have to know how to control all of these various scales and provide for their interaction. For example, many people live in a city. The people make the city, constitute the city, and support the city. The starting point for architecture is to make a simple structure.

If the structure multiplies and accumulates into larger structures, finally a city is created.

For my research, I set up an urban block comprised of buildings of different densities and heights. Then I experimented with ways to apply an agent system to the urban scale.

This scenario proposes dynamic nonlinear architecture as a new language to define future

URBAN VECTOR

urban design. I use vector lines to represent structures and spaces of diverse scales, following this principle of accumulation. Space is building, while void is path. Path is similar to vector. I suggest that vector, in turn, can be read as a new kind of urban space.

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The Fifth Vector

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The Fifth Vector

Scale

Vector Population

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Response Articulation Curves

Response Articulation Curves

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Changsoon Park

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Urban Vector

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Andrew Swartzell

Snooks Studio

GENERATING THE IMAGE OF THE CITY

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The contemporary urban condition is one of constant change and flux, and cities, like complex organisms, have evolved over time to meet the needs of these changing conditions.

Traditional city planning attempts to predict, control, or subvert these changes, often with mixed results. Drawing inspiration from the natural processes of growth and evolution, this project proposes the use of algorithmic design to inform the planning and growth of future cities.

This project is an experiment in multi-agent code that attempts to generate city form through a simulated urban embryogenesis, taking as its

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DNA Kevin Lynch’s five elements of the image of the city. By varying the behavior and interactions between districts, edges, landmarks, nodes and paths, the designer is able to exert a certain degree of control over the ultimate form.

If, in Deleuzian terms, it is the process of growth that actualizes the virtual contained in a strand of DNA, then the process of evolution actualizes the virtual in life itself. In multicellular organisms, evolution has brought about difference in mitosis, a virtual machine which then brings about difference in living organisms. Evolution functions as a meta-

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virtual-machine.

Traditional city planning seeks, often unsuccessfully, to reign in and constrain the natural changes that will occur over the life of a city, preferring to prescribe possibilities rather than allowing virtualities to become manifest. A form of planning born of, and informed by, a model of natural growth will inherently accommodate this change much in the same way that embryogenesis does in organisms, and in so doing we may help the city actualize its best form.

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Generating the Image of the City

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Han Tang

TEQUILA

Snooks Studio

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This project explores the generation of complex order through recursive design strategies. A recursive growth algorithm, based on the logic of the L-System, was developed to create an intensity of ornament and its attendant affects.

The algorithm generates form and organization through its own internal logic in addition to responding to its environment. Consequently it can be considered simultaneously morphogenetic and morphodynamic. The ambition of the project is to rethink the relationship between function and ornament in terms of interior design by integrating stair, chandelier, and wall. On a local scale, each of these elements is carried out in a very programmatic and functional perspective with regards to its own utilization. Each component changes in quality from closed (solid) to open (skeleton), which adds to its variation. Then by different connections, these components aggregate in ways that transform them through iteration and scale. Different formations start to emerge following these local rules, generating many iterations.

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Tequila

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Simon Kim

COMMAND AND CONTROL

The making of architectural form is an interesting domain. Its meaning and motivation has generated much of what shapes the discourse, but the production of form has been augmented and increased in novel and compelling fashion. This amplification in production and technique of form provides an opportunity to engage it as an entirely separate other, and not as a reducible system of parts. But like any entity or system it is subject to its world/environment, input, internal procedures, and output with (sometimes) feedback.

Form as a product of evacuation. Space is perceived as a proxy for programme*, much as it was presented in Cedric Price’s Generator where it is a resultant emptiness within a multi-part system, not chora as discussed by Perez-Gomez - an integrating matrix that binds space, material, medium. Form, then, is applied as a wrapper or container. This space is polyvalent and increasingly determined as an attribute or value vis a vis its delimiting container; Space froths and bubbles in its self-determination and logics shaped in external relationships to each other. What is provided in this manufacture of space is that it does not rely on meaning nor frame – the system in which it is generated is concerned only with how it is reconciled to its outcome. As an object of geometry, space can be stored, sorted, and culled by operations that can then call into the world its situated outcome: it is its own abstraction and outcome. But as an outcome of geometry it can be examined and evaluated in the same way as any other assortment of objects made by an underlying governance of rules and codes. It also becomes clear that the evaluation of these objects is from the primacy of an architectural gaze that seeks to impose a foreign meaning. The construction of this world of objects is governed by a neutral system that intrinsically yields no valuation beyond data. The assignment of meaning and use is a wholly speculative one that takes its criteria from the discipline of architecture.

The evacuation of space is seen here as a negation of its stable qualities so that form is not a resultant but a cross-product: it is a product of its two conditions.

The embodiment of data. The information or data that is generated is not the same as the representation of that data or what is imposed upon its order. This can be expanded beyond geometry so that data itself has measurement that does not necessarily yield static objects to be ‘turned’ into architecture through projective or industrial assignment of core, slab, partition, roof. The narrow confines of the construction industry and building ‘technology’ of data-tag assignments and patterning. To be brief, data as an exposition can be linked from design to production to fabrication.

As speculation it can be complex in generating complex form of aggregated polyhedral. Data can also be bi-directional and responsive where the architectural design is under constant, and localized change. This method finds its best potential beyond simple mapping of sense-and-respond but in the figuring of digital data that, converted from physical phenomena, does not have relegated duties to its original form. It can undergo transformations that demonstrate entirely new digital forms that can again be physically mapped – not to a representational model, but to a responsive prototype of properties with ranges of motion and degrees of freedom.

Ultimately, there are determinants and criteria for systems where even the unpredictable or nonlinear have service. These are embedded in the crafting of not only its internal logics but also in the assessment of its process a priori to architectural design. It is simply not enough to suspend critical engagement until the end of the system, and relieve control and authorship. The designing of the system is untethered from the designing of the architecture. As understood in scales of allometry, one thing is not so easily mapped to the same thing, but bigger. This may be seen as a reluctance to pursue the truly radical and retract to the realm of intuition and composition. However, the extreme or radical provocation is one that yields command by allowing multiple communications. If the position is that form is advanced to its own identification as a separate and unique entity, then all parties must answer to the constraint of cyberneticist Gordon Pask where every agent must have interaction of higher order than linearly mapped functions. If an agent may exhibit boredom, then the division of subject/object is not only broken but the symmetry of non-linear behaviour is not only shared, but expected.

Programme is not discussed here as what is inventive in exercising juxtaposition of normative programme in efforts to reveal the new. This abnormality, or hybrid, or blending programmatically must first be accepted by parties not under control of architects and practice. Furthermore, programme that is designed without form has no expression but rather has multiple ways of being expressed, allowing for both to be independent but latent with possibilities. Programme without form completely, however, does enter into an inverse graph of occupation without geometry, or the purely atmospheric. There is also the addition of new media and higher-dimension electronic worlds that have until recently been anthropomorphized and representational of the physical world.

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Yang Wang

Snooks Studio

My project is concerned more with exploring and experimenting in non-linear methodology than with creating specific forms or modeling. I choose to work with multi-agent systems as a generative design process. The definition of the local rule is that every agent can make simple decisions for itself and also have the ability to influence its neighbors, as seen in ant colonies’ emergent behavior. The individual agents in

the system pay attention to their immediate neighbors rather than wait for orders from above. They think locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior and trends.

In my work, I set two procedures to generate some sort of interesting spatial quality. The first step is to identify a primary architectural structure as a fundamental attractor. Then I

UTOPIAN SPACE DESCRIPTION

define a rule to make the agents interact with each other while at the same time moving around the primary attractor. The recorded trajectories of the agents will realize a space description which goes beyond our prior imagination. This represents a new way to rethink the process of architectural design.

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Utopian Space Description

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Yiqin Wang

Snooks Studio

In this project, the notion of Cellular Automata is applied in the urban design scale to generate a self-organized city. The city is simplified to four fundamental elements: roads, residential buildings, commercial buildings, and landscapes. The whole city starts with its first residential building element, and grows according to the following local rules:

• There tend to be more residential buildings around existing ones • There tend to be commercial buildings where the residential buildings are dense enough • There tend to be roads and landscapes where the buildings are dense enough • Roads near the center of the city are wider than the ones far away from the center.

CITY GENERATION

Based on these parameters, the complex order emerges.

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Wenqing Zhang

Snooks Studio

GeoSwarm looks at at how swarming geometry can be deformed according to spatial conditions to generate gradating formal variations. It is not only Maya that deforms geometry and creates rhythm. Blendshape and wire deformer tools are not the only ways to generate a smoothly variegated series. By using Rhino Monkey, each component begins as identical but is then deformed based on surface curvature, value change, or flowing structural strands in the

process of self-organizing.

This project represents a research-based design process, using new Rhino scripting methodology to deform nurbs and polygon mesh geometry. By controlling the deformation of the skeleton of a component, the component is reshaped as desired. It has great potential to generate form by producing variation in the repetition of components. Structural agency is self-negotiated, while spatial agency

GEOSWARM

is collectively negotiated by swarm-like accumulation of structural agencies. In this way, a certain coherent order and a gradient of variation emerges.

The site is designated as along the sea shore, where the terrain condition varies. Hence the structure-as-agent responds to the unknown contingency of the ground plane, deciding either to follow it or to rebound into a more autonomous vertical tower.

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Wenqing Zhang

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GeoSwarm

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Studio Travel

NEW YORK CITY

Special thanks to those who helped make this trip possible: Anthony Vidler, Dean, Cooper Union School of Architecture; Matilda McQuaid, Cooper-Hewitt; Anna Dyson and Ted Ngai, CASE; and Dean Marilyn Jordan Taylor for funding the trip.

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BIOGRAPHIES Winka Dubbeldam

Ferda Kolatan

Roland Snooks

Winka Dubbeldam is the principal of ArchiTectonics NY [founded 1994] and ArchiTectonics NL [founded 1997]. Winka has lectured internationally and taught extensively at the graduate architecture programs of Columbia University, Cornell University, and Harvard University. Currently she holds the position of Director of the Post Graduate Program at PennDesign, University of Pennsylvania. She has served as a juror in international design competitions—most recently in the Architecture Biennale in Bogota, Columbia—and as the External Examiner for the Architectural Association in London. In 2010 she joined the Board of Directors of the Institute of Urban Design, New York. Winka received the “Emerging Voice” award in 2001, the IIDA/ Metropolis Smart Environments Award in 2006, and in 2008 Archi-Tectonics won the design competition for a sustainable neighborhood and farmers market on Staten Island, New York City.

Archi-Tectonics’ recent built work includes, among others, the 80,000sf mixed-use GW497 building in New York City, the 15-story American Loft tower in Philadelphia, the 2500sf GT residence and guesthouse in upstate New York, and the 3000sf prefabricated DUB Residence in Holland. Current projects under construction in New York City include: the nine-story residential Vestry building, the LRH mixed-use building, and a townhouse in Chelsea. Other current work includes the worldwide store design for the fashion brand PORTS1961 as well as a school in Liberia. The studio’s work has recently been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Venice Biennale; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Ferda Kolatan is a founding partner of su11 architecture+design in New York City. He received his Architectural Diploma with distinction from the RWTH Aachen and his MArch from Columbia University, where he was awarded the LSL Memorial Prize and the Honor Award for Excellence in Design. Ferda has taught previously at Columbia University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of British Columbia, and RWTH Aachen. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at Penn Design, University of Pennsylvania.

Ferda’s work with su11 has received the Swiss National Culture Award for Art and Design and the ICFF Editors Award for ‘Best New Designer’ in 2001. The studio’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art/ PS1 in New York, the Walker Art Center, the Vitra Design Museum, Artists Space New York, Archilab Orleans, Chernikhov Prize Moscow, Art Basel, Documenta X Kassel, Siggraph, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. su11 has had their work published in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, Architectural Design (AD), Archilab’s Futurehouse, Space, Monitor, L’Arca, Arch+, and The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture.

Roland Snooks is a director of the experimental architecture practice Kokkugia. He holds a Masters in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, where he studied on a Fulbright scholarship after graduating from RMIT University (B.Arch). Roland teaches architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University GSAPP and is the George Isaac Distinguished Fellow at the University of Southern California. He has previously directed design studios and seminars at the Pratt Institute, SCI-Arc, UCLA, RMIT University, and the Victorian College of the Arts. Roland’s current teaching and research interests focus on non-linear algorithmic design methodologies that engage complex systems through the development of agent-based techniques.

Roland’s work with Kokkugia has been published and exhibited internationally, including at the Beijing Biennale and Chernikhov Prize in Moscow in addition to being named the Australian Curator for the 2008 and 2010 Beijing Biennale. Kokkugia are currently working on projects in the United States and Mexico. www.kokkugia.com

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Jacque Fresco

Chris Perry

Simon Kim

Mr. Fresco’s background includes industrial design and social engineering, and he was a forerunner in the field of Human Factors. Born in 1916, Mr. Fresco has worked as both designer and inventor in a variety of fields, ranging from biomedical innovations to totally integrated social systems.

The Venus Project is the culmination of Jacque Fresco’s life work: integrating the best of science and technology into a comprehensive plan for a new society based on human and environmental concerns. It is a global vision of hope for the future of humanity in our technological age.

A major documentary, Future By Design, about the life, designs, and philosophy of Jacque Fresco, and produced by Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker William Gazecki, is now available. Another film, Zeitgeist Addendum, which features Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project, was produced

by Peter Joseph and recently released. It can be viewed at Zeitgeist Movie Website.

There are two films currently being produced which feature Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project. Peter Joseph is now working on his third film about Jacque; and Maja Borg, awardwinning Swedish filmmaker, will release Future for Sale, also in 2010.

Chris Perry is a graduate of Columbia University, where he completed a Master of Architecture in 1997 with an Award for Excellence in Design.

Following graduation, he spent two years working as a project designer for Stan Allen before founding his design practice, servo, with three partners in 1999. Servo’s work has been exhibited at a wide variety of prominent galleries and museums including the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Recent publications include a comprehensive monograph of the group’s work entitled Networks and Environments by DAMDI Press in Korea, 10x10_2 by Phaidon Press, Digital Architecture Now by Thames & Hudson, and Interactive Architecture by Princeton Architectural Press. The group’s work is part of the permanent collections of SFMOMA and the Frac Centre in Orleans, France.

Perry is currently the Louis Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. Since 2000 he has taught design studios and theory seminars in the architecture schools of Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Rice University, Pratt Institute, the University of Toronto, and RMIT in Melbourne.

Perry is co-editor of Collective Intelligence in Design, published by Wiley-Academy in 2006, and has published essays in a variety of architectural journals, including Yale’s Perspecta and AD (Architectural Design).

Simon Kim is an architect and design technologist interested in architecture as both a classical and expanded discipline in design and computation.

He holds graduate degrees of Architecture and Urbanism from the Architectural Association in London and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He studied with Mark Cousins, Patrik Schumacher, Neil Gershenfeld, and Erik Demaine. Simon has worked as an architect and designer for Zaha Hadid, at Gehry Technologies with Dennis Shelden, and as a research associate for Bill Mitchell. Recently he established I|K studio, a design-research collaborative with Mariana Ibanez which works in China, Bangladesh, Italy, and the USA. He has previously taught at MIT, Yale, the AA, and is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Book design by Chris Allen, Matt Choot, and Andrew Swartzell Edited by Gideon Shapiro

Thanks to the jurors for their contributions: Donald Bates, Simon Kim, Mark Linder, Toshiko Mori, Ted Ngai, Chris Perry, Dagmar Richter, Marilyn Taylor.