The following papers will be presented during this session on Thursday afternoon, Oct. 16, 2008.
Morphogenomic Urban and Architectural Systems: An Investigation into Informatics Oriented Evolution of Form: The Case of the A2 Highway
Dr. Nimish Biloria
Hyperbody Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft
This research paper exemplifies upon a novel information integrated generative design method: Morphogenomics, being experimented with at Hyperbody, TU Delft. Morphogenomics, a relatively new research area, which deals with the intricacies of morphological informatics. This paper furthermore discusses an ongoing Morphogenmoics oriented design-research case: the development of a Distributed Network-city along the A2 highway, Netherlands. The A2 highway, development is a live project seeking urban development on either side of this busy highway. Hyperbody, during the course of this research initiative developed a series of real-time interactive computational tools focusing upon the collaborative contextual generation of a performative urban and architectural morphology for the A2 highway. This research paper elaborates upon these computational techniques based Morphogenomic approach and its resultant outcomes.
Hydrauli_City: Urban Design, Infrastructure, Ecology
Christopher Hight
Rice School of Architecture
Natalia Beard
Rice School of Architecture
Michael Robinson
Rice School of Architecture
The Hydrauli_city project was commissioned by the Harris County Flood Control District, Brays Bayou Partnership and the Rice School of Architecture to research the transformation of one of the 21 main Bayous in Houston. The project seems perfectly aligned with the theme of the issue because it examines the relationship between infrastructure, risk and urban design, and does so by attempting to leverage diverse time scales and scales of intervention into the maintenance of this infrastructure, rethinking the legacy of its top-down 20th century planning logics. Moreover, it raises key questions about new agencies and sites that may be available to architects that seek to engage the political ecologies of the contemporary metropolis. Through research on the hydraulic urbanism of Houston and through three speculative design proposals, Hydrauli_city presents research about transforming Brays Bayou. The project attempts to provide a figure for and foster the new forms of collectives and networks required to transform the urban condition of Houston without resorting to unrealistic top-down planning infrastructures. We located several scales and time-frames of operations, from micro-scaled interventions derived from ongoing maintenance of the bayous to larger scale transformations now possible due to the programs to reduce the risk of flooding in the bayou’s watershed. Hydrauli_city maps the confluences of interests and agencies invested in Brays Bayou at this crucial moment in its history, and offers proposals of bold new civic spaces for the Green Century. The project will be disseminated via an interactive website and a series of public presentations to raise awareness and spark conversation. Flood risk management is a hybrid phenomenon, at once the object of scientific knowledge, engineering practice, and political and economic forces, positioning the architect in a prime-position to intervene.
Instrumentalizing Coevolution as Design Technique
Michael Robinson
Rice University School of Architecture
The paper introduces the concepts of system, milieu, and coevolution and illustrates how the terms are manifested in projects from an urban research and design studio.
‘iPortals’ as a Case Study Pre-Prototype of an Evolving Network of Interactive Spatial Components
Tomasz Jaskiewicz
PhD researcher, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
The art and craft of design and creation of buildings is undergoing a radical paradigm shift. This shift is being driven by diverse novel cross-disciplinary technical possibilities, as well as by ongoing cultural transformations. They all, directly or indirectly, originate from omnipresent advancements in information technologies. Instant and ubiquitous availability of information and immediate access to computing power pervasively penetrating our lives is profoundly transforming our culture. This phenomenon has enormous implications for architecture in a multitude of ways1.
Firstly, the speed of changes that occur in modern-day culture and society makes it inconvenient or even entirely impossible to design buildings with fixed and permanent functionalities. As lifestyle patterns, production methods and environmental conditions, to name a few factors only, may now dramatically change from one day to another, architecture has to become flexible. It has to allow dynamic, active, or even pro-active adaptation and customization of spaces on many levels of its functionality.
Secondly, these profound cultural changes are not only of technical relevance. In its process-driven character, information technology strongly mandates the already widely recognized ontology of becoming, proclaimed by the prominent minds of contemporary philosophy and science. This process-oriented worldview, supported by latest technological possibilities3, has caused a radical change in the common sense of the manner in which architecture has to be understood and dealt with4. As an effect, it requires an in-depth reconsideration of the nature of processes of both creation and participation in spatial environments.
VIVISYS Project / Robotic Ecologies Lab
Jason Johnson
Oberdick Research Fellow, The University of Michigan TCAUP
Nataly Gattegno
Muschenheim Fellow, The University of Michigan TCAUP
This presentation will focus on the VIVISYS Project installation and other interactive prototypes produced within the context of the Robotic Ecologies Lab at the University of Virginia, USA. VIVISYS was produced in collaboration with the experimental sound artist Troy Rogers of the VCCM. The project was supported by the Tektonics Design Group in Richmond, Extension Gallery in Chicago and Future-Cities-Lab.net.
VIVISYS Project installation is an experimental double-curved lattice vault that supports an interactive soundscape and networked auroras of blue LED clusters. The system is triggered by the proximity of participants interacting with the installation. The module is a half-scale working prototype of a larger conceptual proposal that is suspended within an existing mega-tower located in mid-town Manhattan. It is a responsive ecology that dynamically calibrates its structure, skin and organization in response to locally-sensed information [wind, heat, light, sound, micro-climatic variations, etc.] and remotely-sensed data [weather, pollution, migratory or seasonal patterns, etc.]. VIVISYS is in an endless state of spatial and material flux as it negotiates the desires of its adventurous visitors with the dynamic energy cycles of its site. In its ability to sense, plan, act and feedback information into its system, the proposal suggests a new type of physical environment that is both interactive and intelligent. VIVISYS hints at a future in which the synthesis of energy, form and geometry might yield dynamic ecologies that are simultaneously interactive, productive and expressive.
