Inhabiting Subnature in the Hybrid City

Inhabiting Subnature in the Hybrid City

VANESSA PANAGIOTOPOULOU THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

DEPRAVED URBAN SCAPES Inhabiting Subnature in the Hybrid City

VANESSA PANAGIOTOPOULOU

Final Design Report - BENVGU22 RC 14 History and Theory Tutor: Annarita Papeschi SN: 940358 Word Count: 7927 The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL MArch Urban Design

THE BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

MArch Urban Design

TABLE OF CONTENTS |1 PREFACE | ABSTRACT |2 THE PERCEPTION OF URBAN WASTE DURING HISTORY

The Epidemic Crises of London Internalisation vs Exclusion of Urban Toxicity Energy Expediture vs Energy Acquisition

|3 CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS OF UNSANITARY MATTER

Material Transformation Engaging with Waste through Data and Technology Embracing Parasitism Cyborgian Organic Growth

|4 PROJECT OVERVIEW |5 COMPUTATIONAL URBAN PROTOCOLS OF INTERVENTION

Data as an Image or as an Analytical Tool?

Machine Learning and Dimensionality Reduction

|6 DEPRAVED NATURALNESS

Nature as an Artifice Extending Space through Space Filling Fractals Growth | A Record of Social and Historical Transformations A Contemporary Grotto | Reiterpreting Dankness Conclusion

|7 REFERENCE LIST

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“The advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society�.

Engels & Dickens

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|1 PREFACE | ABSTRACT

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he aim of this design report is to investigate, both in a theoretical and practical context, ways of redefining and inverting the negative sense of contemporary depraved (de-pravus [latin]: perverted, corrupted) urban spaces. Gissen (2008) refers to those spaces as subnatural, or as “postindustrial urban spaces characterized by seemingly subhuman conditions of living”. This project consists in its core approach of transforming the relationship between architecture and pollution from “one which architecture is wholly regarded as a means of separation from a noxious external environment to one of interaction” (Gissen, 2010).

The redefinition of urban toxicity can be detected in various scales, from the urban to the architectural and to the detailed material one. Data driven computational protocols of urban intervention and algorithms simulating natural growth, will attempt to bridge the wide gap between these scales and generate self-adaptive and self-sustained structures according to the needs of the urban context within which they are developed.

This approach will contribute in the configuration of a new spatial milieu, through rendering the space that we avoid to inhabit to the space that could potentially regenerate the city. Moreover, this inverted urban approach will define subnatural elements (Gissen, 2009), or the so called “anxious landscapes” (Picon, 2000) of the urban centers not as a threat but as an existing dynamic element of potential design inspiration. The expected outcome, will be the establishment of a new urban aesthetic and a new way of perceiving space, while producing topological geometries that are configured under the adaptive and fluid interrelation developed between growth and form.

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“The replacement of

the model of leprosy with the model of plague corresponds to the invention of positive technologies of power.

The Classical Age, invented techniques of power that did not function by means of deduction, but by means of production and the maximising of production”.

Michel Foucault, 1974

‘ Chinatown Disease Ghosts’, George Keller, 1900.

Public prejudice considered Chinese immigrants and their unsanitary living conditions, as the main cause for the persistent presence of Malarium, Small Pox and Leprosy .

|2 THE PERCEPTION OF URBAN WASTE DURING HISTORY

The Epidemic Crises of London

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he history of epidemics and public health, indicates that there has been a continuous struggle to transform the perception of urban waste as a marginal excluded space, to viewing it as the antithesis in a dialectic between architecture and atmosphere. The battle between the metropolis and the microbe is detected back in Victorian London of 1854, where the uncontrollable outbreak of cholera intensifies the debate between the supporters of Miasmatic Theory (μίασμα [ancient Greek] = pollution) against those of the Theory of Contingent Contagionism. The supporters of the Miasma Theory (already developed in ancient times in Europe and China), with Florence Nightingale being one of its most active representatives during the 19th century, claimed that the spread of epidemic diseases, was realised through polluted air, the so called “night air” or even by inhaling the odor of rotten matter. At the other end of the spectrum of epidemiology, the supporters of Contingent Contagionism, developed during the 19th century, supported that the spread of diseases was caused through direct contact with infected matter.

Both of the supporters insisted on the validity of their monolithic approach of cause and effect, through an overdetermination (Johnson, 2006) that excluded the potential of an extensive observation of the spatial distribution of the patterns of the epidemic outburst.

After carrying out structured and intensive studies of the pattern of the contagion, the detractors of these rigid theories were able to develop dynamic biological, spatial, and cartographic interpretations of the outbreak.

More specifically, Dr. John Snow and Henry Whitehead, developed a map that correlated in detail the spatial coexistence of cholera incidents and the patterns of the

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‘Cholera‘, Robert Seymour,1831.

Depiction of the spread of cholera in the form of toxic air according to the Miasma Theory.

‘Monster Soup’, William Heath, 1828.

The woman holds a microscope aiming at a drop from water of the Thames, where viruses and bacteria are represented as monstrous creatures.

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‘Death’s Dispensary’, John Pinwell, 1866.

Illustration stating that the source of cholera is contaminated water and not toxic air.

‘The Ghost Map’, John Snow, 1866.

One of the first data visualisations, depicting incidents of cholera, clustered around water pumps in Soho, London.

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water supply routes scanned on an urban scale. The pattern of the registered cholera incidents, appeared to present particularly high density around a specific water pump in the district of Soho, used by the locals. Soon, and in debate with the rigidity of the Miasma and Contagionism Theory, the two researchers linked the outburst of the epidemic with the water deriving from London’ s sewer lines and water pipes. These, were finally proved to be the realm of bacterial and viral life in the metropolis of the 19th century and the cause of the wide spread of epidemic diseases.

The research of Snow and Whitehead was guided by a rigorous examination of urban waste and decay, exempted from social prejudice and over deterministic conclusions driven by the weight of tradition. The unsanitary living conditions and the massive death tolls discovered by the methodical study of these spatial patterns, revealed new ways through which the epidemic crisis could be controlled and public health regenerated. “The battle between metropolis and microbe was over, and the metropolis had won“ (Johnson, 2008).

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Internalisation versus Exclusion of Urban Toxicity

Likewise, Michel Foucault, in his series of lecture the Abnormal (1974-1975), compares two metropolitan epidemic crises: that of the plague of the 18th century and that of leprosy of the 17th century. Here, he identifies two different approaches of dealing with the epidemic crises, that of a spatial and social internalisation of the disease and that of the exclusion of the disease. As in the case of cholera discussed above, overly deterministic perceptions of urban space were created through the imposition of rigid and classical binary oppositions such as pure | impure, civilized | barbaric, neutral | extreme.

Foucault, understands this process of overdetermination in terms of the notion of regression, a regression that intensifies the marginalisation of elements that do not fall in the extreme edges of the aforementioned binary oppositions. Moreover, here, regression is the implicit element of a general superstructure of power which defines relations of potency and according to Foucault (1975), these are linked to ignorance and blindness. These rigid binaries ultimately condemned these marginal spaces as abnormal, intensifying their disarticulation and fragmentation instead of designating them as territorial zones for potential regeneration.

According to Foucault, the lepers’ exclusion from the urban metropolis, presents an inversion of the way in which the state dealt with the plague victims during the 18th century. In the plague’s case, the infested zones, were dealt with a permanent quarantine of the patient within a “closed territory” internalized in the spatial context of the city. Instead of determinedly casting out from the urban territory abnormal elements in order to

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maintain its purity, the territory internalises abnormality while it becomes “an object of a fine and detailed analysis, of a meticulous spatial partitioning (quadrillage)” (Foucault, 1975). The notion of the “quadrillage“, could be retrospectively related to a computational way of encoding the city according to specific patterns and spatial organisations.

The quarantine system observing the “quadrillage” of the city, was functioning under a hierarchical pyramid of uninterrupted power, where the divisions and subdivisions of space and responsibilities, attempted to maximize the power of individuality and integrate abnormality. The factors that formed this hierarchical pyramid, such as doctors moving around the city, acted as agents following -in an almost algorithmically regulated way- a set of rules and calculations under the spatial guidance of the “quadrillage“ that appeased toxicity, while spatially and socially internalising it.

The lepers’ exclusion, reinforces the disarticulation of space through oversimplified dual schemes, where the marginal intermediate space should be exterminated. On the contrary, the plague victims’ integration, identifies the assimilation of these marginal spaces as a creative potential zone of remediation and regeneration. Regression and deduction as ways of dealing with excessive waste were replaced by maximized recreational production from toxicity perceived as superabundant energy.

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Energy Expenditure versus Energy Acquisition

Back in the Middle Age, the medieval city’s urban growth was incited significantly from the amount of night soil produced by its citizens, but mostly from the way this excrement was absorbed, rematerialised or rejected within the urban fabric. The so called nightsoil men, plowed back into the earth organic waste, by therefore introducing a primitive form of recycling. This action had as an impact the increase of the fertility of the soil of medieval towns and as a result, raised the population ceiling and led to permanent urban growth and development.

In a more contemporary context, Bataille (1949) in his book The Accursed Share, insists on the significance of dealing with the excess of any form of waste and energy within the urban context instead of rejecting or dissipating it. More specifically, he indicates that “the history of life on earth is mainly the production of increasing burdensome forms of life”. This superabundance can be absorbed from the growth process of living matter. The topic of energy expenditure versus energy acquisition, becomes more crucial in contemporary marginal toxic territories, where the direct absorption of excessive energy is not prioritised in the process of their reformation. This happens when these territories are approached through the classical aspect of “non-linearity” (Chandler, 2014) where the relationship between subject and object is predefined, and therefore the systems’ inherent complexity –and hence resilience- is rejected as one of its most radical existential properties. Chandler (2014) signifies the importance of defining these spaces as resilient systems with inherent interactive complex relationships. In the

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same vein, Bataille (1949) emphasizes the significance of the pressure averted by the adjoining space of the surrounding living matter on a polluted system, as excessive energy that will reactivate its growth circle.

Subsequently, environments are extremely complex, and therefore one needs systems of data capture and meticulous analysis, in order to apprehend these problems on an actionable level. The inherent complexity of a system, as well as the local environmental conditions, render the level of pressure dedicated to the system’s recovery, deeply dependent on the local acquisition of live data describing in detail the volatility of its behavior, the conditions under which it is formed and can be reformed, as well as the interrelation of biomass, local climatic and geological conditions. Data variability, regulates the intensity of pressure and therefore regulates a system’s growth.

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“The transformations

of nature and the social relations inscribed therein are inextricably connected to the process of urbanisation.

Urbanisation is a process of deterritorialisation and re-territorialisation through metabolic circulatory flows”.

Erik Swyngedouw, 2004

“Mosquito Bottleneck” François Roche, 2006.

‘Forms of Energy in Venice Lagoon’, amid.cero9, 2010.

The project proposes a technical system which produces environmental and visual effects from the capture and emissions of energy.

|3 CONTEMPORARY MANIFESTATIONS OF UNSANITARY MATTER

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here are a number of contemporary

architectural manifestations which, at their core approach, embrace urban waste and denigrated forms of nature, as an underexplored socionatural spatial milieu which is generative of superabundant energy.

These present a variety of practical approaches including: material transformation, organic growth and terraforming—all regulated by data provided by local environmental conditions.

Material Transformation

Rendering urban toxicity to a fertile territory, includes the parameter of being able to remetabolise it, potentially when matter is subject to permanent material transformations. Material transformation, termed as Stoffwechsel by the architect Gottfried Semper in the 19th century, evokes the transformation of architectural elements over time, where a structural form is transferred from one material to another and overtime is disengaged from its initial original function. The same term, amended by the chemist Justus von Liebling, inserts the notion of transformable eco-materiality.

Architectural studies that are engaged with the notion of transformable eco-materiality in urban spaces, shift the definition of the latter from rigid dualities (such as pure | impure) to a process of “transmutations of forms in a context of interrelatedness that excludes all absolute distinctions� (Gissen, 2010).

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“View of the Aqueduct which conveyed water from Salona to the palace”, Robert Adam, 1764.

“Aspiration”, R&Sie(n), 1998.

The debris of the lagoon is gradually forming the skin of the building.

In historical representations of toxic matter, unsanitary water evoking from contaminated sewage systems and stagnant puddles has been the symbol of a society’s inability to manage urban and social decay. In order to intensify the contrast, in these representations, waste was accompanied by sublime ancient ruins, now inhabited by filthy animals and peasants. Recent approaches, under the spectrum of eco-materialism’s transformatory process, are proposing a new type of socionatural interaction between architecture and debris. By using the latter as an actual construction material, instead of repelling or eliminating it, these manifestations designate the significance of perceiving and exploiting waste as superabundant energy.

Following this line of thought, R&Sie(n) in the Aspiration project, propose the retraction of algae and polluted water of the canal of Venice, from existing buildings’ envelope, and their transformation to sanitary constructive materials. While proposing a new type of socionatural interaction between architecture and debris the architects express clearly their purpose of engaging with depraved matter: This project is not about water purification, which would tend to idealise and clean the canals of their impurities of stagnant algae. Instead it makes use of the city’s lagoonal identity.

The liquid is sucked up with all its odour and residues, into a sea-green matrix. Odor of salt water, spectral lighting, plastic colonized by foam, humidity.

This project gives expression to processes of sedimentation and hybridisation, simultaneously cloned onto the skin of former industrial buildings and charged with corporality, the raw materials of this city, water and algae.

The contemporary city is often in a hurry to witness its own destruction or reproduction. The processes here are more ambiguous, more like substitution or genetic cross-breeding between what history has left us and its mutant recycling...

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This metabolic circulatory process, simply stated as recycling of toxic matter, is realised also in different forms of nature such as the atmosphere. In the project Social Oxygen Balloons, amid.cero9 architects, propose a complex of pavilions where the material, conceptual and spatial transformability of toxic air is developed within the skin of the proposal. The skin mediates between two contradictory environments by blending their segregating limits. This intermediate system made of wood, is intersected with a plantation of blown pieces made of PET (a common thermoplastic polymer), which contain cultures of the micro-algae Spirulina platensis.

These microcultures from their side, produce large amounts of oxygen and therefore purify and humidify the polluted air inserting the pavilion. The transformability of matter, from contaminated to infiltrated is developed in several layers, from the physio-aesthetic transformation of the overall urban territory within this mutable practice takes place, to the actual metabolism of oxygen within the surface walls, by therefore forming a new social and environmental milieu.

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‘Oxygen Balloons’, amidcero9, 2008.

Details of the structure’s skin system.

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Correspondingly, dust was perceived in the western world not only as an inevitable after effect of massive industrialisation and metropolitan construction but as a threat that will dominate over the cities in the future. Bataille, (Krauss and Bois, 1997) conceptualised and symbolised dust as a growing invader that will replace the presence of human beings and dominate over space. In the Encyclopedia Acephalica (1995), a critical dictionary containing a series of definitions for different forms of depraved matter, Bataille envisages dust in future environments: DUST The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spiders’ webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses.

Meanwhile, dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates.

Contrariwise to this approach, R&Sie(n) architects on the Dusty-Relief project, have developed a structural system able to accommodate permanent dust aggregation on its skin, until this parasitic growth completely covers its host. The proposal presents an engagement to pollution while dealing with aggregating forms and material transformation of dust and particles of carbon monoxide. The subnatural materiality of the building is detected on its skin which attracts solid particulates contained in atmospheric contamination, and transforms them to a materiality which clearly establishes urban atmospheric decay as an aesthetic discourse. The host, which is attracting dust instead of repelling it, is blended with the parasite to a spatial entity, which is “reconceptualised to breed dust from its surroundings� (Arbona, 2010).

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“Dusty Relief”, R&Sie(n), 2002.

Conceptual Section.

“Dusty Relief”, R&Sie(n), 2002.

Conceptual model presenting the gradual accumulation of dust on the structure’s skin.

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Engaging with Waste through Data and Technology

Further contemporary attempts of designating subnatural zones within the urban context, involve the perception of unsanitary matter such as air or ground pollution as a living organism, whose permanent mutations, can be detected exclusively from datasets describing live their quality levels. The acquisition of data analysing and visualising unsanitary conditions, transform subnatural elements into informatory dynamic topologies.

In the River Glow project — a collaboration between Natalie Jeremijenko and Amphibious Architecture — on the waterfront of New York’s East River, people passing by the river, are given electronic access on live data describing the water quality of the river. Self-charging fiber-optic illuminated buoys, radiate different levels and colors of light, which are determined by the pH levels of the river’s water. Simultaneously, these sensors are able to detect the movement of fish, which in return provides live information on the water quality and can be decoded and received on the passer’s by phone. Thereupon, data and ubiquitous computing, become a scientific medium for citizens to perceive polluted urban forms of nature as live and responsive organisms with which they are able to interact. In this case, data acquisition surpasses an abstract group of descriptive values and is actively participating in emerging environmental issues.

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“River Glow“, Amphibious Architecture, 2007.

a dynamic world. Political and cultur conditions change: what if the walls and windows morphed in response?’

New York-based team The Living, le

by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang have developed a practice of deep, op source interfaces of participation. Jor Geiger describes how for The Living their home city and its environs is a site of evolving forms of public space whether on land, air or water.

Sensor monitoring live the water quality through the movement of fish underwater.

“River Glow“, The Living, 2007.

Fibre-optic and light emitting diode buoy that switches from green to red according to the pH levels of the water.

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The Living The Living with with Natalie Natalie Jeremijenko, Jeremijenko, Amphibious Amphibious Architecture, Architecture, New New York,York, 20092009 below: below: Diagrams Diagrams explaining explaining interaction interaction with with fish. fiThe sh. project’s The project’s website website directs directs visitors visitors on on SMSfithe sh (and fish (and a short a short tutorial tutorial on how on how to SMStothe even even names names themthem as collaborators, as collaborators, with with monikers monikers such such as Mark as Mark Bain).

Bain).

bottom: bottom: Installation Installation view,view, live on livethe on the opening opening nightnight at theat the East East River.River.

“River Glow“, The Living and Natalie Jeremijenko, 2007.

Human and fish interaction. The website of the project enables the visitors to SMS the fish and name them as monitors providing information concerning the current water quality.

“No Park“ Natalie Jeremijenko, 2011.

Microlandscape interventions in New York.

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A project that actively approaches this last parameter, is Jeremijenko’s NoPark interventions, which are prescribed to improve air and water quality. The project consists of micro landscape interventions in no parking zones of the New York City where most likely water collectors and fire hydrants are placed. These areas of concentrated moss and low grass vegetation infiltrate air pollutants, generated from the emissions that occur along the massive road network of the city. While infiltrated, the pollutants are prevented from penetrating road surface stagnant water, and therefore are blocked from reaching underground water tube conductors and being released in the city’s harbor. The contribution to the improvement of local environmental health is massive since apart from soil and air infiltration, the infiltration of static water pools on the streets prevent pedestrian slipping hazards and also prevent the concentration of mosquitoes that on a next level could increase the chances of a spread of West Nile virus.

In Jeremijenko’ s project, in order to achieve the establishment of an urban intervention that has the potential of aggregating almost the majority of air road pollution concentration, what was required was a close and critical overview of the data collected that presented the existing situation. Advanced computation was required in order to calculate the level of pollution absorption from the specific type and amount of urban planting proposed, so that it would be equivalent to the amount and type of air pollutants emitted in activities of the road network.

Whilst engaging with sophisticated computation, the designer collected and used data concerning air toxicity under alternate protocols, by therefore initiating critical models of approaching emerging environmental issues.

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Embracing Parasitism

The acquisition of data concerning local environmental conditions can surpass conditions referring to the atmosphere, the water and the ground and can shift to data describing the behavior of living organisms such as pests, inhabiting these ecosystems.

When it comes to parasites, insects and animals, these have been historically identified at the threat of infestation and invasion of inhabitable spaces. Nevertheless, the complexity of the symbolic interrelations developed between parasites, society and architecture is already revealed centuries ago, when their spatial movement, settlement and practices had established metaphors and allegories in architectural discourses. Further to that, their biotopes have served as a representational archetype for forms of socialisation. During the French Revolution, the beehive became the symbol of the values of liberty, equality and fraternity and was identified with the “collective industriousness� (Gissen, 2008).

Simultaneously, its representation became a symbolic allegory of the top to down political hierarchy of imperial England of the mid-19th century. The bottom of the hive is occupied by workers, whereas the top is populated by ministers and financiers surrounding the queen, whom we find in the very top of the structure.

In the 1930s and before the use of insecticides was propagated, George Orwell describes in his book Down and Out in Paris and London the dominance of pest species in domestic environments and their identification with unsanitary matter: The walls were as thin as matchwood, and to hide the cracks they had been covered with layer after layer of pink paper, which had come loose and housed

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“The British Beehive“, 1867.

“The Metamorphosis”, Franz Kafka, 1915.

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innumerable bugs. Near the ceiling long lines of bugs marched all day like columns of soldiers, and at night came down ravenously hungry, so that one had to get up every few hours and kill them in hecatombs.

Sometimes when the bugs got too bad one used to burn sulphur and drive them into the next room; where upon the lodger next door would retort by having his room sulphured, and drive the bugs back. It was a dirty place, but homelike.

Gradually, the parasite’s spatial perception shifted from a simple representational symbolisation to a spatial experience realised through architectural experiments. The project Heart City: The White Suit by Coop Himmelb(l)au (1967), engaged with the design of media, perception and sensations through technology.

The designers developed a type of insectoid with a helmet and a pneumatic vest which enabled the user to experience the senses of insects. The connection was achieved by distorting the visual perception of the user and by exerting various pressures on his body.

“Heart City: The White Suit”, Coop Himmelb(l)au, 1967.

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The otherwise parasitic and unsanitary presence of insects and animals within the human living environment can be rendered in a design medium that supersedes arbitrary simulations of nature, and focuses on naturalistic representations of data deriving from a close observation of the territorial living practices of various pest species. In the Mosquito Bottleneck project, R&Sie(n) architects, are collecting data describing the local mosquitos’ movement and behavior in a mosquito infested area of Trinidad. The collected data, is spatially translated and materialised to a dwelling with an ambiguous role. The outcome is simultaneously embracing and protecting from threatening subnutural forms, by “mixing the objective paranoia with a desire for safety” (Roche cited in Gissen 2008).

“Mosquito Bottleneck”, R&Sie(n), 2003.

Frames from simulations describing the spatial behavior of mosquitoes.

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“Mosquito Bottleneck”, R&Sie(n), 2003.

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Cyborgian Organic Growth

In contrast to the aforementioned practices of debris aggregation, the term “growth” refers mostly to organic, fluid and constantly developing subnutural living matter whose main property is aggregation. Aggregating systems, described by Deleuze and Guattari as the “weedlike rhizome” (cited in Gissen, 2008) are embodied in earlier examples, on the Stranded Sears Tower (1991) by Greg Lynn, where the project “ensnares its surroundings to a new type of animistic space” (Gissen, 2008).

This notion of ensnarement, in the form of irregular growth invading the negative space of the built environment, is presented in the project Lost in Paris (2008) of R&Sie(n). The project proposes a self-sustained system of urban vegetation along with glass beakers collecting water. These ferns, receive nutrition from the surrounding environment, which feed the growing plants without imposing spatial limitations to their growth, whose irregularity is completely driven by natural laws.

This “dinosaur plant, a primitive biological body“ (Roche cited in Arbona, 2010) tends to lead towards a complete territorial dominance of nature on the urban fabric.

“Lost in Paris“, R&Sie(n), 2010.

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Plant growth is no more a conventional accompany of existing infrastructure with ecological purposes.

Platonic ideas on natural beauty and balance become obsolete under the realm of hybridized and “cyborgian” (Haraway cited in Swyngedouw 2004) merging of nature, society and technology. Human activities exposed in this condition, consider this form of growth as an alienating coloniser of space, which raises the complex issue of the interrelation developed between growth, form and urban waste.

All the aforementioned contemporary architectural practices have legitimized the “matter out of place” (Douglas cited in Gissen, 2008) and have advocated approaches of designing through urban toxicity, using as design methods evolving eco-materiality, the engagement of users with waste through data and technology, the enablement of organic growth driven by natural laws within the urban fabric as well as the involvement of generative algorithmic design in the simulation of this circulatory growth process.

“Symbiosis Hood“, François Roche, 2010.

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“The power [of data] is as an image of potential assemblage, human and non-human, and in this they are already “political” in the possibilities of agency that they project. But now, how can they be activated? How can monitoring become redesign of what it monitors? How does the image become an image-instrument?”.

Benjamin Bratton, 2009

|4 PROJECT OVERVIEW

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his design proposal will focus on engaging the atmospheric toxicity of East London with urban interventions whose emergence will be characterized by the process of growth and aggregation regulated by data which define local environmental conditions. By engaging all the aforementioned approaches and methods with my design proposal, the gap in knowledge was identified on adapting a generative system based on irregular growth and deriving from the complexity of multidimensional datasets into the urban context as well as controlling its irregularity through computational tools. In particular, the gap that this design proposal will attempt to bridge, is that between the over determination that the mechanistic contribution of computation could cause and the irregularity of live matter and organic growth. Hence, air pollution will be shifted from its identification with the need for disqualification and marginalisation, to the establishment of a new urban discourse, regulated by computational tools and at the same time driven by the dystopian aesthetic of growth and live matter.

In terms of methodology, the project will be guided on a theoretical base by the above discourses and on a practical base, it will focus on approaching space on different levels under the spectrum of data analytics and generative algorithmic design. The data analysis will shift from simple acquisition and visualisation of data concerning atmospheric pollution, its absorption from urban green, simulated wind conditions and

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spatial modeling analysis, to machine learning dimensionality reduction which will identify areas with unique characteristics for intervention. Further to that, generative algorithmic design will lead to the generation of systems whose main patterns of the circulatory process of birth, life and death are characterized by aggregation, organic substance, material transformation and self-sustainability. The expected outcome will be the establishment of a new urban aesthetic on the site of intervention, while producing topological geometries that are configured under the adaptive and fluid interrelation between form and growth driven by natural laws on the one hand, by data on the other.

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|5 COMPUTATIONAL URBAN PROTOCOLS OF INTERVENTION

Data as an Image or as an Analytical Tool?

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n regards to data analysis models, this

includes three stages of analysis: the collection of data, their graphical representation and further on their interpretation in order to extract information concerning current and future environmental conditions. At the very first stage of this analysis, the different means of data manipulation, may distinguish them to qualitative and to quantitative. In his book The Vast Machine (2010), Edwards identifies chronically and historically this critical differentiation between datasets, on the advent of the infrastructural change cause by ubiquitous computing.

The standarisation and automisation of the 50s, allowed data scientists and more specifically climatologists, to reduce the noise and distortion of the collected datasets, and render them homogeneous, even when they were evoking from heterogeneous sources.

As a first step of urban strategy, the project itself involves the use of datasets construing environmental conditions of the site, by using computer models and environmental simulations, in order to transform raw data into knowledge. The data manipulation includes acts of visualising and illustrating them through different simulation processes and spatially correlating them with the existing urban fabric in order to extract information concerning the current state of the site of intervention.

Angular Segment Integration Analysis.

Closeness Centrality (R4000) around the Olympic Park of Stratford.

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Nitrogen Dioxide Concentration on Site.

Measured in μg/m3.

Absorption Levels of Carbon Dioxides.

Absorption of Sulfur Dioxide and Carbon Dioxide from trees, measured in g/sqm per day.

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On the first stage of data analysis, the participation of the role of the human factor within the urban network is inserted as prior, in order to evaluate the need for intervention and therefore, a spatial network analysis of Angular Segment Choice and Integration was run on the site. More specifically, Choice or Betweenness Centrality, measures how likely “an axial line or a street segment it is to be passed through on all shortest routes from all spaces to all other spaces in the entire system or within a predetermined distance (radius) from each segment” (Hillier, 1987), by therefore indicating the centrality of a node of a given area. Additionally, an Integration or Closeness Centrality Analysis was run, demonstrating a “normalised measure of distance from any a space of origin to all others in a system” (Hillier, 1984). These analyses, run in different radii on the broader area around the Olympic Park of Stratford, provide an overview of the way that the centrality and the density of the area’s traffic network might contribute in the coexistence of air pollution and the human factor at the same time.

For example, the mean concentration of Nitrogen Dioxide measured in μg/m3 on the site, is visualised as a rough mesh created by a set of data points, provided from monitoring stations around the area. The concentration presents higher values within the area’s dense road and railway network, due to vehicle emissions, and also where the density of the urban fabric is higher and subsequently energy consumption and heating emissions reach a peak.

On the same vein, the best tree species for pollution absorption as well us their capacity of Sulfur Dioxide and Carbon Dioxide per tree measured in g/sqm*d, are visualised by providing as an output an overview of the levels of air quality.

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The visualisation of Big Data as “messy point clouds, rough meshes, angular fragments, and data smog” (Carpo, 2017) reveals the discreetness of nature embedded within, a discreetness that is not based on predicted mathematical and geometrical laws. However, when it comes to a more extensive spatial correlation of the aforementioned datasets, their manipulation through simple illustrations, might lead to generic and predictable assumptions and also to confirmations of existing knowledge concerning the spatial distribution of air pollution and the various factors it derives from and it affects.

In the series of essays Situated Technology: Situated Advocacy (2009), Jeremijenko and Bratton, express a rather critical approach to three major stages of data manipulation. These are: the way this data is actually collected, the level of consciousness of the user|designer on how statistically clean it is, as well as the contribution of data visualisations to the improvement of sensitive ecosystems. They both focus on datasets concerning air quality and provided by federal databases, and indicate that environmental data is “collected in response to regulatory compliance issues“. Even before the data reaches the designers’ hands, the question of the way that it has been collected is raised. Data used in data driven design and drawn from federal databases, is mostly collected by hired engineering staff and not by staff specialised professionally on interpreting their validity and homogeneity.

After the stage of data collection and when it comes to data visualisation it is obvious that computation

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penetrates the core of the design process, leading one to the critical and insightful question of “how can monitoring become redesign of what it monitors? How does the image become an image-instrument?” (Bratton,2009) when it comes to crucial environmental issues that need to be drastically handled.

Subsequently, the first stage of visualisation of local environmental data on this project, represents mostly information descriptive of the current condition of the site. Undoubtedly, the “diagnosis“ (Edward,2010) part which constitutes of this stage of data manipulation , is transforming “raw data from a relatively few points into a coherent, self-consistent picture of atmospheric structure and notion“ (Edward, 2010). Nevertheless, at this part of the design process, the element that was considered as absent in order to supersede a simply informative contribution of data, was the extraction of information on the powerful interactions and interrelations developed between these local data values.

Edwards, mentions the act of “infrastructural inversion” as fundamental on the way scientists handle data. He claims that in order to extensively understand the data infrastructure, the scientist and designer, has to invert it, “turn it upside down and look at the ‘bottom’ — the parts you don ’t normally think about precisely because they have become standard, routine, transparent, invisible. These disappearing elements are only figuratively ‘below‘ the surface, of course; in fact they are the surface.“

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Machine Learning and Dimensionality Reduction

An acquisition of general assumptions deriving from data visualisations in different expressions falls into the category of bottom-up design strategy, depending on how the designer applies the data in the urban context.

In a bottom-up approach, the designer is compiling different systems of data into a more complex one. This new system includes the initial systems, as sub-systems of the emergent one. However, this might result in the welding of subsystems developed in isolation, leading to misleading conclusions regarding the interaction developed between the data.

As opposed to that, drawing on the idea of infrastructural inversion as previously defined by Edwards, basic machine learning methods are inserted, in order to convert the “image“ to the “image instrument“ and in order to approach in a more rigorous and exploratory way the interaction between the collected datasets. The project applies two algorithms that process the data through dimensionality reduction, Principal Component Analysis and K-Means Clustering. The first one, uses as an input georeferenced datasets, and transforms them to a set of uncorrelated variables which provides as an output, areas that present the highest interaction between the data. Accordingly, K- Means Clustering, predicts and detects subgroups within the inserted dataset which are clustered areas with similar characteristics.

In this occasion, acquiring as an output a set of uncorrelated variables which describe in detail the dynamic spatial interaction developed between the data, states a revolutionary way of dealing with the latter, disengaged both from top-down or bottom-up strategies of intervention.

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Overlaying of Risk Assessment, PCA and K-Means Clustering on site.

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“We find the

implementations of mineral and vegetal, organic and inorganic morphogenesis, in a true dramatisation of mutations of generation and corruption”.

Frédéric Migayrou, 2013

|6 DEPRAVED NATURALNESS

Nature as an Artifice

T

he advent of Mannerism in late Renaissance (1520-1600), sets aside neo-Platonian values and inaugurates the era of a new perception of science aiming at experimentation. Migayrou, in Naturalising Architecture (2013), a critical analysis of the interrelation between nature and artifact through history, insists on the fact that this experimentation in the domain of science is based on its core on the transition from naturalness to artificialness. One of the first manifestations of this aesthetic, symbolic and scientific twist is detected in the encyclopedic collections of objects exposed in the Wunderkammer, or the so called Cabinets of curiosity.

These were rooms, devoted to a collection of peculiar objects, that stimulated the visitor’s curiosity from the fact that nature, otherwise perceived as the epitome of perfectionism, can express morphogenetic deviations from its archetypal harmony. “Until then, nature was perceived as a geometrically powered cosmos using numbers, weight and measure. Now it is transformed into a complex morphological domain whose procedures must be decrypted“ (Migayrou, 2013).

Following, Migayrou’s line of thought, an engagement between naturalness and artificialness, between natural laws of birth and growth and the mechanistic approach of computation that this project attempts to engage with, had already appeared during the age of Mannerism, in a more symbolic extent. This is ascribed to the fact that the movement expressed an early fascination for the morphological transformability of nature, concurrent with that of simulation and automation. In a more contemporary context, the design project, engages these two tendencies, on a spatial scale by attempting to establish a new urban discourse and

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a morphological aesthetic, regulated by computational tools and at the same time by the natural laws which define transformations of materiality and the dystopian aesthetic of growth and live matter.

Extending Space Through Space Filling Fractals

On the spatial context of this project, the transition from naturalness to artificialness, involves the use of natural growth algorithms. These were considered as the most appropriate to engage with the flux of living systems inherent within subnatural zones and produce infinite variations according to local environmental conditions.

After detecting areas of high risk and highly interactive data, these algorithms that simulate natural growth processes, were applied and driven by in situ datasets. Generative processes adapted on the urban context, attempt to embody the need of dealing with superabundance of energy, on a system whose level of growth is regulated by the energy it absorbs . This is attempted, by taking into account the “constant relation of the biomass to the local climatic and geological conditions, life occupies all the available space“ (Bataille,1949). The in situ conditions, configure the notion of “pressure” exerted by life towards all directions, and once this pressure is exerted on the adjoining space, the available space of the latter is increased, by therefore rising the potential of growth and absorption of excessive energy.

In the spectrum of that, one of the main endeavors of the project, is to spatially and conceptually engage with air pollution, by generating growth and ideally excessive energy through space filling structures. These filtering structures were developed under the principles of the algorithm of Differential Space Filling Growth, which was

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Procedural Growth of the Space Filling Phenomenon.

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chosen by considering that the morphological complexity of the structures deriving from it, approaches the structural complexity and morphology of natural systems which are considered as the basic element anticipating air pollution The Differential Space Filling algorithm, based on the space filling curve, a mathematical process discovered by Giuseppe Peano in the 19th century, generated topological geographies, which defined the character of the morphological output of the urban intervention. During the design process the digital manipulation of the space filling phenomenon inspired by natural growth, required both the pursuit of optimisation and variation of the emerging structure. While dealing with natural irregularity, the digital medium, provided the possibility of flexibility and distortion. This was achieved by generating numerous variations, tested in digital simulations, which finally supersede the unevenness of the natural phenomenon and adapt to the need of the urban context of the site. On the one hand, optimisation lead to the optimal answer of the infinite variations that were produced digitally, and therefore a digital distortion of the structure enabled its spatial adaptivity with the needs of the users. Simultaneously, the possibility of generating infinite variations through the digital medium, offered the chance to infiltrate pollution through variant ways and with different alterations.

In the context of that, the project proposes a set of interventions that deal with pollution both on the horizontal as well as the vertical sense and accommodate different types of uses within the spaces they create, as well as different types of engagement with depraved natural forms. By maximising the space within limited boundaries, the supplementary space produced here, attempts to give prominence to the life that “suffocates

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Early Iterations of the Space Filling Structures, Top view.

Early Iterations of the Space Filling Structures, Perspective view.

Growth was populated on the structures, through digital simulations of the Diffusion Limited Aggregation Phenomenon.

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within limits that are too close; it aspires in manifold ways to an impossible growth; it releases a steady flow of excess resources, possibly involving large squanderings of energy” (Bataille, 1949).

Growth | Record of Social and Historical Transformations

The perception of growth as a socially determined invader of space, has already been challenged since the representations of the picturesque in the art of the 19th century. The invasion of weeds and their dominance over ancient ruins challenged the classical perception of beauty of the Renaissance. The impeachment of the strictly organised and symmetrically arranged landscape expressions of the time, was realised under the notion of the irregular, the unexpected, the invasive and the unwanted.

Even from the early 50s, Frank Lloyd Wright in his Autobiography, engages with the idea of inserting growth both as a potential architectural material and as a metaphorical concept:

The wielder of the hoe would wonder why weeds couldn’t be studied, possibilities found and then maybe cultivated.

The “crop“ eliminated...

Tobacco was a weed once...

And tomatoes were once thought by Europeans to be poison...

Nearly everything was a weed once upon a time...

What vitality these weeds had!

Pigweed... Would these weeds become feeble, if they were cultivated and “crops” became as vigorous as “weeds“ if able to flourish on their own?

What of such science and art?

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Conceptual Representation of a Space Filling Structure.

The cells occupying the structure’s surface, are isolated according to local solar radiation values. These values define the organic deformation of the structure.

Accordingly, in the context of the project, the morphological output itself, experiments to reconseptualise the notion of growth within the urban fabric. The notion of growth here presents two expressions, one interpreted on the morphology of the emergent structures themselves, the other on the gradual vegetal growth that the materiality enables on their surface. The structures were organically deformed according to local environmental data describing solar radiation values, as well as shadow and humidity levels per annual season.

Shadowed areas of the structure with high humidity, are enabled through the use of bio-receptive concrete, to accommodate the growth of a type of moss which is absorbent against pollution contaminants and resistant to the lack of sunlight. This was brought into a form that is able to adapt to the existing environment, by using digital simulations for solar radiation, shadow analysis and also tools which predict digitally the areas where the growth of moss will aggregate.

The transformability of materiality is both spatial and conceptual. The structure works as a mediating environment that infiltrates toxic air and ambiguously, its sustainability is activated by the level of toxicity surrounding it, since growth and toxicity feed one another.

Hence, a user’ s experience of this growth, as subnutural and depraved, despite its infiltrating and absorbent capacity, reveals that the perception of the intervention as invasive or dirty, already has a “socially determined undesirability“ (Gissen, 2009), which the project attempts to redefine.

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Traditionally, exhausts and air pollution, represent in the postindustrial western city, the unsanitary and uncivilised past from which a cleaner and more global city will arise. The urban intervention proposes a new language that inverts this discourse and “instrumentalises” exhaust and pollution contaminants as records of social transformations and historical changes, an “uncanny register of time“ (Bataille, 1949) reflected on the urban environment.

A contemporary Grotto | Reinterpreting Dankness

David Gissen attempts to reengage spatial atmospheric properties such as moisture and shadow, otherwise defined as dankness with urban environments transforming over time. He associates the notion of dankness with archetypal architectural forms and detects it in prehistoric times, to that of the grotto. The grottoes were cave-like spaces, depicted during Renaissance as “quasinaturalistic and mythic scenes of underground worlds with technically sophisticated waterworks“ (Gissen, 2008) Nevertheless, the upcoming modernism in architecture, strictly focusing on the sanitirisation of domesticity and having as a major discourse the dominance of light and air over darkness, renounced the engagement of spatial familiarity with the atmospheric qualities of the grotto. On the contrary, Bachelard, clearly affected

by Jung’s phenomenological approach of consciousness through memories, thoughts and sensations, links one’ s familiarisation with space, with his fundamental perception of home as expressed in the dreams and the subconsciousness. This familiarisation with archetypal forms of living such the grotto, and more recent such as the attic and the cellar banished by Le Corbusier, are brought into light by Gissen in more contemporary forms for living. More specifically, he mentions that the “atmospheric depths of the cellar, might ironically be a sign of architectural developments yet to come“.

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Under the spectrum of this narrative, the project’s micro-climatic properties engage the spatial engagement of the user with the archetypal notion of the grotto.

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The bio-receptive concrete that enables the growth of moss according to the level of humidity and shadow, elaborates on the idea of a contemporary grotto which produces a new socionatural spatial milieu. This milieu works as a conceptual threshold, which is symbolically defined by Bataille in the Encyclopedia Acephalica, as the segregating invisible line, whose crossing is identified with traversing a “zone of danger, where invisible but real battles are fought“. This threshold, represents a “new spatial milieu through colonising air and earth” (Gissen, 2008).

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CONCLUSION

The final outcome of this experimentation, is the fact that the design is deriving itself from the initial condition and issue that it is meant to solve. The project, with the aid of the mechanistic approach of digital tools on natural morphologies, is shifting from the expected final outcome to the initial condition that generated the whole process of design and vise versa. The synchronisation of this initial condition with the final outcome, is identified in the social, conceptual and spatial appropriation of urban spaces with deviated naturalness, and actively involves the act of internalising the “abnormal”, as defined by Foucault (1974).

This was achieved under the light of the initial statement that this project was guided from, which suggests that no matter is inherently unsanitary and not socially or ethically predefined as that; “dirt is a social category that we assign to specific types of social relations. It lacks any fundamental physical quality.

Instead it is a relationship” (Swyngedouw, 2004). The common structure under which this relationship is defined is the designation of the ceaseless displacement of birth, growth and death as an infinite circulatory process, inherent within a system’s capacity for selfsustainability. Death as part of this circulatory process, is the indispensable factor that defines the place left vacant for the acquisition of new forms of growth, “distributes the passage of the generations over time, it constantly leaves the necessary room for the coming of the newborn” (Bataille, 1949) and “weaves networks of infinite liminal spaces” (Swyngedouw, 2004).

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ENSAP Malaquais 3. Bataille, G. 1988. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. New York: Zone Books 4. Bataille, G. Leiris, M. Griaule, M. Einstein, C. Desnos, R. 1995. Encyclopedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related Texts. London: Atlas Press, Atlas Archive Three Documents of the Avant-Garde 5. Bois, Y. Krauss, R. 1996. Formless: A User’s Guide to Entropy 6. Bratton, B. Jeremijenko, N. 2009. Situated Technologies. Pamphlets 3: Suspicious Images, Latent Interfaces. New York: The Architectural League of New York 7. Brayer, M. Migayrou, F. 2013 Naturaliser l’ Architecture/ Naturalizing Architecture. Orleans: HYX Editions, Collection FRAC Center, pp. 38-59 8. Carpo, M. 2017. The Second Digital Turn: Design Beyond Intelligence. London: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts

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9. Chandler, D. 2004. Resilience and the Governance of Complexity. Oxon: Routledge 10. Edwards, P. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. London: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 11. Foucault, M. 2003. Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975. London: Verso 12. Gissen, D. 2013. City of Dust. Artforum 13. Gissen, D. 2009. Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments. New York: Princeton Architectural Press 14. Gissen D. 2010.Territory: Architecture Beyond Environment. London: Wiley 15. Hillier, B., Burdett, R., Peponis, J., Penn, A. (1987), Creating Life: Or, Does Architecture Determine Anything? Architecture et Comportement/Architecture and Behaviour 16. Hillier, B. & Hanson, J. (1984), The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 17. Johnson, S. 2008. Ghostmap: A street, a city, an epidemic and the hidden power of urban networks.

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20. Picon, A. 2000. Anxious Landscapes: From the Ruin to Rust. Massachusetts: Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 21. R&Sie Architects. 2004. Corrupted Biotopes. Design Document Series 05. Korea: Suh Kyong won 22. Swyngedouw, E. 2004. Circulations and Metabolisms: (Hybrid) Natures and (Cyborg) Cities. Oxford: School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford University

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