“Computation is impregnating built ecologies, soon to exist deep within the fibres of its structure. Increasing the material resolution and levels of information while having access to the coding of material, structural and organisational behaviours will also intensify the ability of designed systems to learn and adapt to complex ‘host’ conditions, narrowing the gap between matter and information. Additionally, there is an emergent phenomenon evident in the changing qualities of the nature of design. The more is not just more, the more is different.
Large populations of agents are interlinked by micro-transactions taking place over a vast territory and reflecting self-regulatory pressures within environment, global migratory patterns and complex programming. This intelligence is being encapsulated as series of proto-architectural entities capable of rewriting existing protocols, including the inability of architecture to productively and creatively address acute issue of ecology.
Within the PROTOCOLS design-research series, ADAPTATION is targeting generations of micro-ecologies – highly adaptive and capable of ‘learning’ – embodying specific host data under precisely established constraints of architectural systems for inhabitation along coastlines. The focus will be in the adaptability of clearly outlined structural, typological, material and organisational criteria, as well as the input of specific topological, weather and similar host data into the co-evolution of proto-architectural specimens.
ADAPTATION is a poly-scalar, multi-dimensional micro-ecology with a capacity of processing various scales of ecological and human / non-human probabilistic population patterns. It performs as a convergence of novel material, structural, organisational and aesthetic behaviours through reinventing programmatic and tectonic protocols. It offers a critique of current development strategies both strategically and politically. As its driving force it embraces change and the conditions of dynamic stability. In moving away from the linear, se¬rial differentiation that dominated digital design practices in the past decade, the studio will engage with production of singularities; highly heterogeneous and adaptive systems of development across various scales.
Computationally, emphasis will be placed on high-population agent-based systems that are based on non- deterministic principles capable of adaptation to and re-patterning of the found conditions. Focus will be on development of generative design systems, methods for their trans-coding and explicit connection to constraints. Prototyping sequences in the studio will consist of explicit reprogramming of pro¬duction processes, be it direct encoding of constraints of fabrication and material, or strategies for larger scale construction processes.”
Alisa Andrasek,
Excerpt from AA_DRL PHASE_I_FINAL_PUBLIC_JURY
13/14_JUNE_2011 brief
FissurePort by Biothing
