DRL (Design Research Lab) Architectural Association School of Architecture, London-UK (2009-2011)
AA DRL The DRL(Design Research Lab) is a 16-month postprofessional design programme leading to a masters of architecture and urbanism (MArch) degree. The DRL investigates digital and analogue forms of computation in the pursuit of systemic design applications that are scenario- and time-based. Considering controls systems as open acts of design experimentation, the design research lab examines production processes as active agents in the development of proto-design systems.
DESIGN RESEARCH AGENDA : PROTO-DESIGN During phase I, Proto Design, investigates digital and material forms of computational prototyping. Parametric and generative modelling techniques are coupled with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic feedback processes. New forms of spatial organisation will be explored that are not type- or context-dependent. The aim is to detect scenarios that challenge the parameter-identification that allows systems to evolve as ecologies of machines, as material and computational regulating systems, towards an architecture that is both adaptive and hyper-specific. The iterative methodologies of the design studio will focus on the investigation of spatial, structural and material organisation, engaging in contemporary discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. Proto-Design systems developed in phase I will be tested in site-specific testing scenarios in phase II. Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Digital Materialism, examines behaviour as a catalyst to explore adaptive and deployable models. Yusuke Obuchi and Robert StuartSmith’s studio, Proto Tectonics, looks at architecture as a product that can be involved in its production process and add value to itself. And Patrik Schumacher and Christos Passas’s studio, Proto-Tower, is focusing on the design of inherently adaptive, parametric proto-types that intelligently vary general topological schemata across a wide range of parametrically specifiable site-conditions and briefs. Alisa Andrasek’s studio, Agentware, is exploring the potential of rewriting material agency via the agency of information. Marta Malé-Alemany’s studio machinic control, examines architectural design processes incorporating novel digital fabrication.
STUDIO BRIEF PROTO-TECTONICS Our studio brief presented by Yosuke Obuchi and Robert Stuart-Smith remarked the relationship between architecture and production, trying to alter the comprehension of architecture as a production of signature and iconic building to become part of the value of the products being produced. Throughout its approach, an architecture of production engages with a significant socio-cultural determinants and negotiates economic and environmental fluctuations in addition to material production. In other words, the attempt in this agenda was to place itself around a type of architecture that adds or reduces the value of products depending on how it engages with being part of the rest of the world, wherein it yields sort of material system that could integrate with its context and relative environmental forces. Tectonic logic was to be understood as an emergent property comprising both part-to-whole and reversed hierarchies and relationships within itself and included required design decision making in a wide range from micro-scale to macro-scale of the system. The issue of time in terms of architecture’s life-span or in other words life-cycle was one of the significant cores of our brief that brought the most important challenge for us to engage with. Place of Production ,(hesitantly Factories for the lack of a better word), was what our typology of architecture had been entitled ,wherein architecture rather than being a product alone, becomes an interface between socio-cultural, tectonic and natural systems. In summary, Proto-Tectonics explored how non-linear design processes may be instrumentalised to generate a temporal architecture with a designed life-cycle. Seen as a recursive process of productions and consumptions, the research aims to contribute to contemporary experimentations on the topic of design ecology. The studio attempted to extend the research into complex systems by developing design logics and strategies for the life-cycle of the buildings through means of production, consumption and reproduction.
We were asked to investigate : - Life-cycle of designed products (including builings) as a case study - Readily available materials that exhibit phase-changing properties and to construct a series of prototypes that harness their potential as possible building materials as well as investigate their potential fabrication processes - Generate families of variations through non-linear design processes that privilege the self-organization of built material.
** with Thesis Project Distinction
TEAM
35 DEGREE
As one of four studio teams in Proto-Tectonics agenda, presented by Yusuke Obuchi and Robert Stuart-Smith in Design Research Lab v.13, 35 DEGREE is comprised of four students ;...
Ahmed Abouelkheir(Egypt), Behdad Shahi(Iran), Jiah Lee(South Korea) and Junyi Wang(China), ... gathered together for a collective one-year project towards Masters in Architecture and Urbanism.
TERRI-FORM TERRI-FORM is a material based design research that proposes a self-organisational model of material formation that generates a temporal architecture with a designed life-cycle. TERRI-FORM is an eco-resort on the red sea that has been designed through a zero-waste formative process whose architecture reorganises materials naturally available on the site and redistributes these back into its environment at the end of its cycle. The research proposes a time-based architecture through a tectonic system that extends Frei Otto’s research of sand formations using sand’s natural angle of repose. Formations are hardened as a surface through the phase changing properties of a saline solution which crystallises when cooled, bonding with the sand. An on site fabrication process allows for an annual re-territorialisation of the site by creating a temporary architecture that endures for eight months until the rainy season ensures its dissolution into the landscape. The materiality and spatial qualities of the project are based on the conical geometries generated through the gravitational process of sand formation.