CITA SUMMER INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ART SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AUGUST 2009
Interactive Architecture Workshop and Installation The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art // School of Architecture Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) August 2009 Architecture // Environment // Mechatronics
Hylozoic Soil Montreal Beaux-Arts Museum 2006-7
Hylozoic Grove Ars Electronica Linz 2008-9
SUMMARY A major interactive architectural environment will be developed at CITA at the Royal Danish Academy during August 2008, involving an advanced month-long workshop that brings experts from Waterloo Canada's Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing and Philadelphia's PennDesign to work closely with experimental architectural designers and creators within the Copenhagen community. This month-long event would disseminate innovative approaches to immersive, kinetic architectural environments to the Copenhagen public, while at the same time providing professional development to Danish designers in advanced digital design methods through close collaboration with these international designer-creators. The workshop will design and fabricate a new immersive kinetic sculpture environment that responds to user stimulus with dense, distributed fields of physical movement controlled by massively repeated arrays of microcomputers embedded within the textile-like layers of the space. This will be mounted in a large public gallery space on the grounds of the Royal Danish Academy. Professional architects and new-media artists from the Copenhagen community interested in experimenting with this new technology will be invited to join a series of training and collaborative sessions during a month-long workshop that culminates in the mounting of this environment. Demonstrations and lectures will be held during this period to disseminate the work. BUDGET Funding is sought from the Dreyers Fond OF 70,000 DK [$16,500 CDN] to provide key resources of technical staff, materials and a portion of travel expenses to bring the leaders to Copenhagen. If achieved, a corresponding commitment has been secured from Canada's Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council funds controlled by Beesley to increase this core commitment by $40,000 CDN in cash and $30,000 in -kind contributions in order to enhance the project with staff time, equipment rentals, supply of specialized mechatronics systems, and for employing and transporting North American engineering and digital fabrication assistants to Copenhagen for the duration of the session. If this application is successful, a corresponding application would also be proposed to the Dreyers Foundation for use of their residential facilities in order to provide accommodation space for the visiting team while in Copenhagen. We are also sending an application to Metropolis 09, in order to pursue additional support for public dissemination fo the work during the Metropolis festival. Total budget exclusive of Dreyers Foundation apartment and Metropolis funds is $56,500 cash and $20,000 in-kind resources. Funding building upon the Dreyers core request is being committed from Canadian sources including University of Waterloo, Canada Council for the Arts, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Philip Beesley Architect Inc. EXPERIENCE AND TRACK RECORD This proposal builds on architect-sculptors Philip Beesley (Waterloo), Mette Ramsgard Thomsen (CITA) and Jenny Sabin (PennDesign)'s highly successful
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CITA SUMMER INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ART SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AUGUST 2009
Endothelium Broad Art Centre/CnSi, UCLA 2008
Orpheus Filter London Building Centre Gallery 2005
collaborations in recent years creating responsive, interactive architectural environments, using digitally-fabricated lightweight architectural textile structures and microprocessor-based embedded systems for environmental interaction. These projects are a hybrid of sculpture, engineering, and architecture that employ flexible lightweight structural meshwork densely populated with arrays of mechanisms that can modify the environment and interact with the user. The general objective is to find a new role for architectural environments, transforming portions of static buildings into active, responsive surfaces. A corresponding ethical objective is to find sensitive, renewed relationships for human occupants interconnected with their surrounding environment. This work have received much public attention in press and journal reviews where the work is being cited as an exemplar of a new paradigm for 'responsive architecture' [example: VIDA Fundacion Telefonica First Prize 09; WIRED Magazine Oct. 07; 'Interactive Architecture' Fox textbook Princeton 2008; Penn Design Textiles Seminar 08, AA Environmental Tectonics Unit 07, U Manitoba Responsive Architectures Unit 08, Nottingham Digital Fabrication M. Arch. 08 etc]. Thomsen and Beesley tested their collaboration in a large-scale Canadian workshop and installation (Metabolic Networks, Dalhousie 2007) and Beesley and Sabin likewise have presented effective public workshops and exhibitions together (Fiber, PennDesign 2007-8, Aesthesia, Illinois 2007, ACADIA Minneapolis 2008)
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR COMMUNITY Working in collaboration with Beesley, Sabin, and Thomsen, a select group of Danish architectural practitioners and advanced professional students will be trained in experimental methods of digital fabrication, lightweight component design, accretive geometry, interactive systems including electronics, kinetics, controls and behavior scripting. An initial workshop will provide skill-building training. Individual and group development will proceed permitting specialized exploration weighted to participant interests. The workshop will culminate in an immersive installation exhibited in the gallery spaces of the Royal Danish Academy CITA facilities.
ORGANIZATION The CITA program will integrate and optimize durable kinetic mechanisms with control systems characterized by decentralized responsive intelligence, using massively repeating miniaturized custom laser-cut components, low-cost custom microprocessors, sensors and actuators. The work will be developed by means of exchanges between Beesley, Sabin and Thomsen each focusing on specialized layers that are brought together in cycles of development. The work is organized by a schedule of skill-building workshops, creative experiments, and public presentations. Specific dissemination will include public interactive media installations using microprocessing controls, digital fabrication and lightweight ‘textile’ lattice structures. Implant Matrix InterAccess Gallery, Toronto 2006
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CITA SUMMER INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ART SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AUGUST 2009
The integral connection to contemporary artistic practice is emphasized by Canadian Architect’s description of the work as ‘transformative’1 and by Architectural Design Magazine as ‘exquisite thresholds…’2
Constructed from arrays of repeating elements, the architectural environments developed under the CITA event will be designed at multiple scales: at the level of intricately detailed individual custom components, intermediate tessellations and clusters composed of component arrays, and large-scale integrated environments composed of multiple layers of specialized systems. The space will be fabricated using computer-controlled rapid prototyping equipment and will be activated by distributed arrays of sensors and actuators. The character of the assembly will emerge from the combined and compounded 'chorus' effects of numerous actuated mechanisms, distributed throughout the structure and controlled locally by microprocessors. The microprocessors will use local information obtained through proximity and capacitance sensors to govern actuated movement. Mechanical interconnections and digital communication systems will connect individual components into meshed arrays. The goal of this project is to develop integrated approaches to responsive envelope systems using digital fabrication of extremely light weight, flexible component arrays containing embedded sensors and actuators. The strategy is to use cycles of experiment and implementation that combines the disciplines of industrial design, digital fabrication, three-dimensional modeling and visualization, mechatronics and control systems design. TECHNOLOGY Shape-memory allow actuators offer lightweight, high energy density, and 'solid-state' actuation characterized by contraction and expansion offers an extremely effective form of actuation akin to the operation of organic muscle fibres. Over the course of the project, several short term goals will be achieved: networks and systems composed of complex parts assembled into coherent artificial 'organisms', integration of discreet actuation systems based on shape memory alloys, innovative techniques for creating large volumes out of small amounts of material, implementation of digital fabrication and advanced modeling, simulation and visualization techniques. The long term goals of this research suggest future building linings and skins that can provide local mechanized reaction to subtle changes in the building’s occupation. By probing our relationship to nature and technology, a potent understanding of critical implications of interactive technology will be gained. This creative work will offer sensitive relationships that attempt to find a renewed relationship for human occupants with the surrounding environment.
Epithelium Siegel Gallery, Pratt, Brooklyn 2008
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ARTISTIC VISION The CITA proposal pursues an altered psychology that fundamentally changes our relationship with the things we build. The large-scale field structures offer bodily immersion and create a wide-flung dispersal of perception. The details of these sculptures are designed to catch and hold the things they contact, collecting and digesting material and building themselves. This work relates to nineteenth and twentieth-century spiritualist texts that envision the world as an intelligent, evolving
Douglas Macleod, Canadian Architect Magazine, Dec. 2004 Bob Shiels, cover article 'Orgone Reef' in Wiley/Academy’s Architectural Design/Design Through Making, Vol 75, 2005
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CITA SUMMER INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ART SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AUGUST 2009
Reflexive Membranes Cambridge, 2005
entity and dwell on uncanny mixtures of anxiety and hope. The installations contribute contemporary dimensions to the Romantic tradition of working with forces far beyond human control. A mechanical kind of empathy is a central quality in the work, building upon opposing attitudes of 20th-century theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s extraordinary optimism about human potential and Surrealist write Roger Caillois’s sometimes obsessive pursuit of dissociation. Caillois studied insect behaviour as an analogy for a psychopathy of dissociated identity: 'Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his sense. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space [...] And he invents spaces of which he is ‘the convulsive possession’.[...]'3 Mechanism is a central term of reference for this work, drawing upon new disciplines of mechatronics and artificial intelligence, integrated with applied technologies of industrial design and digital manufacturing. The parallel term, empathy, draws upon aesthetic theory that examines nuanced relationships involving projection and exchange. The broad tradition of Organicism forms the context for this study. In the next phase of work, we hope to revise a common understanding of organicism as a late ‘romantic’ mode opposed to modernism, and instead renew the sense that this movement is an ongoing tradition deeply embedded in twentieth-century and contemporary culture. Our pursuit is of a hybrid that, instead of unifying or polarizing opposing forces, pursues complex mutually dependent relationships. A technical goal of this project is to expand the potential of interactive and kinetic functions for architectural environments by developing integrated approaches to responsive envelope systems using digital fabrication of extremely light weight, flexible component arrays containing embedded sensors and actuators.
COLLABORATION Intensive repetition of small parts and assembly are key elements to the Reflexive Membranes projects. Organized teams of volunteers will assist core members of the workshop. In-house rapid prototyping equipment at CITA includes industrial strength laser cutters and milling machines for high yields. Individual elements will be pre-assembled in to component assemblies ready for on-site installation. Led by project team members, participants assemble the pre-fabricated components on site following design conceived in the first stage of the project. Participants gain substantial experience in manipulating assemblies. Variations in composition require graduate students to learn geometric rules and constraints, permitting degrees of flexibility for accretive construction by relatively autonomous teams of workers. RELATED WORK The new architectural environment will build upon technical experience and poetic judgement gained from working with new mechanical details and interactive controls. The images presented with this application show a body of work that has evolved over the past decade, concentrating on immersive and seething qualities built up from intensive repetition of miniature parts. This can be seen in the following projects: • Hylozoic Soil (2007), an extremely lightweight expanded actuated diagrid corrugated mesh integrated with underlying mechanisms that displaced the mesh in rolling swells, with layered arrays of 'breathing' pores that transferred plumes of air in response to human occupants, colonies of whiskers whose chorusing actuation created local concentrations of rippling movement, and widespread bladder fields charged with salts that created hygroscopic accumulation of fluids from occupant-generated humidity. 40,000 viewers attended the Montreal 3
Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’ trans. John Shepley, in October: the First Decade. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987 [1937].
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CITA SUMMER INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ART SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AUGUST 2009
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Beaux-Arts exhibition of the installation which was featured in the popular-press WIRED magazine. A permanent edition of the installation has been acquired by the Museum of the Future, Ars Electronica, Linz and a further extension of the series is currently being mounted at Madrid-Matadero, 2009. Implant Matrix (2006), is an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future. The matrix is capable of mechanical empathy. Networks of mechanisms react to human occupants as erotic prey. The structure responds to human presence with subtle grasping and pumping motions, ingesting organic materials and incorporating them into a new hybrid entity. An installation at Interaccess Galley, Toronto presented a working prototype of interactive systems, and was published in Domus. Reflexive Membrane (2004-5) was a hovering mass that explores new kinds of building envelopes that expand and respond to their viewers. Arrays of PIC microprocessors, sensors, and actuators based on the Art Interface Device project hosted by Interaccess Gallery, Toronto operated in responsive exchanges. This sculpture, presented at Cambridge in 2004-5, included first generations of interactive systems. Orpheus Filter (2003-4), London Building Centre Gallery and RIBA Pavilion, Birmingham (AD Journal cover article) was a stratified membrane that derives its strength from two overlapping geometries incorporating layered passive mechanisms designed to germinate a hybrid ecology. Cybele (2004), is a self-assembling lattice connected by rare earth magnets. As the structure flexes, the barbed cellulose membrane self-heals and ‘knits’ itself together. Haystack Veil (1989), is a landscape of cut saplings, floating over a moss and lichen covered cliff alongside the Atlantic Ocean in Deer Isle, Maine, an early version of the current series acting as a cloak over the earth.
TEAM Philip Beesley OAA, B.ARCH, DIP. TECH., BFA, Prix de Rome Director, University of Waterloo Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing Associate Professor, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo Philip Beesley Architect 242 Indian Road Toronto, ON M6R 2W9 Canada pba.inc@rogers.com www.philipbeesleyarchitect.com Jenny E. Sabin M.ARCH, BFA, BA Assistant Professor, PennDesign CabinStudio+ 1010 Race Street No. 8L Philadelphia, PA 19107-2336 USA jsabin@cabin-studio.com http://www.cabin-studio.com Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen PhD, M.ARCH, BFA, BA Centre for Information Technology and Architecture Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Søndre Kontorbygning Bygning 72, St. th. 1435 Copenhagen mette.thomsen@karch.dk http://cita.karch.dk
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CITA SUMMER INTERACTIVE ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ART SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AUGUST 2009
BIOGRAPHIES
Philip Beesley
OAA, B.ARCH, DIP. TECH., BFA
Philip Beesley practices digital media art and experimental architecture in Toronto. His creative work in the last two decades has focused on field-oriented distributed sculpture and landscape installations. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queen’s University in 1978 and received his professional degree in Architecture from the University of Toronto in 1986. He maintains a practice that combines sculpture with public buildings, exhibitry and stage design. He frequently works within art collaboratives and was a founding member of the Kingston Artists Association, an ANNPAC parallel gallery. In parallel with his sculpture practice he teaches architecture at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Cambridge, Ontario and is co-director of Waterloo’s Integrated Centre for Manufacturing, Visualization and Design, a facility combining high-performance computing, advanced visualization and digital fabrication. Distinctions for his work include the international VIDA and FEIDAD 2008 awards, the Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada), a Governor-General’s award (AJD,DS+Co), two Dora Mavor Moore Awards, three OAA Awards for Architectural Excellence.
Jenny Sabin
M.ARCH, BFA, BA
Jenny Sabin is the Direction of CabinStudio+, a research and architectural design studio based in Philadelphia. She recently collaborated with Cecil Balmond and the Advanced Geometry Unit, Arup LOngon on an installation at Artists Space, NY entitled H_edge. She is this year’s co-recipient, along with Peter Lloyd Jones, of the prestigious Upjohn research grant administered by the American Institute of Architects, as well as the recipient of the AIA Henry Adams first prize medal and the Arthur Spayd Brooke gold medal for distinguished work in architectural design, 2005. She was an American Association of University Women Selected Professions Fellow, 2004-2005, and has exhibited at numerous galleries in Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Sydney. She was a senior tutor and lecturer at the 2007 and 2008 Smart Geometry workshops and conferences in New York City and Munich. Jenny is also a founder member of the Non-Linear Systems Organization (NSO), a research group at PennDesign, where she is currently Senior Researcher. Sabin’s research and practice focuses on investigating the intersections between architecture, textile structures, computation and biology. More specificially, this interest probes the hybridization of algorithmic design techniques generated through the analysis of biological design problems with experiments in fabrication and material construction. These investigations question and engage a contemporary notion of the architextile within the greater scope of generative design and fabrication. She is currently collaborating with the Jones Lab at the Institute for Medicine and Engineering (IME), most recently initiating a research LabStudio between the IME and the NSO together with Peter Lloyd Jones.
Mette Ramsgard Thomsen PhD, M.AA Mette Ramsgard Thomsen studied architecture at The Royal Academy in Copenhagen and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. Since qualifying as an architect in 1996 her work has focussed on the development of Mixed Realities, the experience of spaces which are defined by part physical part virtual dimensions. She co-founded escape with Jesper Mortensen in 2003. In 2004 Mette Ramsgard Thomsen completed an interdisciplinary PhD in architecture and computer science at University College London. Mette is currently a researcher and tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, research fellow at the Department of Computer Science, UCL and a Senior Lecturer at University of Brighton, School of Architecture and Design. Her work has resulted in multiple research events in the form of exhibitions, performances, workshops and seminars and has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board, from The Arts Council England as well as from the Arts Foundation, Copenhagen. She has worked in multiple international research centres including the Fraunhofer Institute, Germany and the Human Interface Technology Lab, University of Washington, USA.
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