evental spaces: Μαΐου 2015

http://plethora-project.com/completeworks/2012/04/27/moth/

‘Living systems are units of interaction; they exist in ambience.’
Humberto Maturana1

‘I shall consider the physical environment as an evolving organism as
opposed to a designed artefact. In particular, I shall consider an
evolution aided by a specific class of machines.
Warren McCulloch

calls them ethical robots; in the context of architecture I shall call them
architecture machines.’
Nicholas Negroponte2

György Kepes once proclaimed, ‘In our new conceptual models of nature, the stable, solid world of substance, which in the past was considered permanent and preordained, is understood as widely dispersed fields of dynamic energies. Matter – the tangible, visible, stable substance in the old image of the physical world – is recast today as an invisible web of nuclear events with orbiting electrons jumping from orbit to orbit.3 The fixed and finite tendencies that once served to categorise the natural and the man-made worlds have been rendered obsolete. Today the intersections of information, life and matter display complexities that suggest the possibility of a much deeper synthesis. Within this context, however, architecture is being forced to radically refactor its response to new social and cultural challenges and an accelerated process of urbanisation. All over the world, cities are emerging in the kind of timeframe that buildings are usually developed in, and outdated practices dictate that these cities are generic,
unable to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the built environment.
To counter this, architecture today must participate and engage with the information-rich environments that are shaping our lives by constructing computational frameworks that will allow for change, embracing a demand for adaptive models for living. Our approach to addressing these challenges explores a systemic form of interaction that engages behavioural features that are polyscalar, allowing biodiverse networks
to operate between urban contexts, buildings and materials. An intimate
correlation of material and computational interaction allows for the emergence of a generative time-based behavioural model of living,
where the interplay of local agency and environmental stimulus constructs collective orders.

Environmental stimulus gives rise to structures of elaborate complexity, as these systems are able to continuously adapt to local and global signalling. Unlike most man-made structures,
the architectures of these structures are not embedded in a blueprint, but rather are correlated operations governed through emerging collective interaction.

‘Technology is the answer – but what was the question?’
Cedric Price4

A Cybernetic Approach
In September 1969 a landmark issue of Architectural Design, guest-edited by Roy Landau, brought issues of interaction and digital computation into mainstream architectural media for the first time. Alongside articles by Nicholas Negroponte, Cedric Price and Warren Brodey, the issue featured an essay by the cybernetician Gordon Pask, who introduced the idea that ‘architects are first and foremost system designers who have been forced to take an increasing interest in the organisational system properties of development, communication and control’.
5 Architecture,
Pask argued, had no theory to cope with the pressing complexities of the time, and it was only through a cybernetic understanding of systemic processes that the discipline would evolve. Central to Pask’s argument was an understanding of the world through the pursuit of ‘communication and control’ and the elucidation of what he termed ‘aesthetically potent environments’ – external spaces designed to foster pleasurable interactions. These interactions were to be framed through a commitment to novelty. ‘Man’, he wrote, ‘is prone to seek novelty in his environment and, having found a novel situation, to learn how to control it’.

In his foreword to John Frazer’s seminal book An Evolutionary Architecture (1980), Pask presents a fundamental cybernetic thesis that ‘architecture is a living, evolving thing. In a way this is evident. Our culture’s striving towards civilisation is manifested in the places, houses and cities that it creates. As well as providing a protective carapace, these structures also carry symbolic value, and can be seen as being continuous with and emerging from the life of those who inhabit the built environment. It is appropriate to stress an important cybernetic feature of the work; namely that unity is not uniformity, but is coherence and diversity admixed in collusion.7 In the work of Gordon Pask and other artists and scientists, the use of cybernetic methods resulted in new experiential forms of practice.8

As telematic artist Roy Ascott notes, cybernetics has transformed our world by ‘presenting us with qualities of experience and modes of perception which radically alter our conception of it’.9 In addition, second order cybernetician Ranulph Glanville has argued that cybernetics constructs a new way of thinking about the material world: ‘the knowledge we previously had from science was all about trying to remove the observer so we could talk about an artefactual world full of things, but it is very difficult to argue about a world that exists without our sensing it’.10 Glanville emphasises the role of the active observer and the distinctions to be made between science and design. In design he sees a cybernetic process at work – a form of conversational interaction. For Glanville designers ‘are not observers of the world, but observers in the world’.11 Therefore, design as an activity should not limit itself solely to descriptive forms but rather use casual and circular relationships to identify generative qualities that will continuously redefine and evolve the design system itself. This is a process of continual formation rather than a state of fixed form.

Behavioural Machines: Singular vs Collective Agency
The dynamic and adaptive approach advocated by this publication is not one of form but of correlated formations – a model of collective living that addresses the spatial complexities of the city. A synthesis of material and computational interaction constructs a generative organisation of space and structure that explores a behaviour-based model of living through patterns found in nature.

‘Many of the most striking (pattern) examples that we encounter
around us are evidently the products of human hands and minds –
they are patterns shaped with intelligence and purpose, constructed
by design.’
Phillip Ball12

System-to-system interactions identified through simple rule-based protocols can collectively exhibit complex non-linear behaviour. The magnitude of these interactions is explored across varied scales to test the potential of self-structuring orders constructed through the interplay of local agency and environmental stimulus. Early analogue cybernetic experiments – such as Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles – address the significance of parameters dealing with the observer in order to understand our tendency to attribute life-like properties through simple, relational agent interaction.

As a result, embodied patterns emerge through goal-oriented systems that exhibit life-like characteristics. These social orders allow a synthetic interplay to construct a new breed of proto-animalistic architectures that evolve through negotiated interactions, creating a fusion of digital and analogue computation that draws on the pioneering work of the renowned neurophysiologist W Grey Walter. An interest in cognitive operations and biological systems led Walter to develop his machinae speculatrices (machines that watch) – autonomous robots that could demonstrate how simple organisms exhibit non-linear interactions. The first of these were named Elsie and Elmer, and they took the form of phototropic tortoises inspired by a character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Designed with a primitive nervous system, the tortoises constructed social action and self-organisational patterns that were characteristic of animal behaviour and ritual. Walter’s genius lay in his ability to recognise complex adaptive behaviours in simple interconnected systems that focused on goal orientation and adaptation through learning. This allowed the robots to be free-ranging autodidacts that built up intelligence through interaction.

After completing his experiments with the tortoises, Walter wrote in The Living Brain (1953) that there was a ‘well-defined difference between the magical and the scientific imitation of life. The former copies external appearances; the latter is concerned with performance and behaviour. Until the scientific era, what seemed most alive to people was what most looked like a living being. The vitality accorded to an object was a function primarily of its form.’ Through a fusion of synthetic and natural systems, architecture can construct machines that are generative, evolving relationships that couple new forms of spatial organisation with fabrication. The ability to shift preoccupations from object to system allows our built environment to play an active and participatory role in the construction of adaptive forms through feedback.

From Object to System
György Kepes states in his introduction to The Nature and Art of Motion (1965) that ‘to structure our chaotic physical and social environment as well as our knowledge and values, we have to accept the conditions of the new scale and learn to use the tools that have grown from it’.13 New sensibilities have evolved in relation to communication through mediated and remote interaction, which are now critical to a research that explores the role of space and in particular the ways that the physical and public environment can communicate as an active agent. As Kepes’s Bauhaus mentor and colleague László Moholy-Nagy once observed, ‘design is not a profession but an attitude … thinking in complex relationships’.14 Today, the role of science and technology offers architecture some of the most radical and thought-provoking scenarios if approached in a manner that enables participatory and collective emergence.

In a 1964 article titled ‘The Construction of Change’, Roy Ascott attempted to outline the terms for engaging art as a system based on the interrelations between artist, audience and environment.15 His proposal stemmed from his belief that ‘cybernetics was the science of behaviour and art was essentially behaviourist’. Through the interaction of these constituents, one could construct an environment in which new models of practice foreground participation, allowing aspects of play to evolve and thus creating new forms of knowledge. Ascott elaborated this idea further in his 1967 manifesto, Behaviourables and Futuribles, noting ‘when art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.’

He went on to reinforce this sentiment by emphasising the importance of the societal and cultural: ‘for a culture to survive it needs internal acrimony (irritation), reciprocity (feedbacks) and variety (change)’. In this way, the coupling of design and technology could bring about a discourse that was social and optimistic, buoyed by the shared belief that, through innovation, new channels of communication would emerge that would interconnect previously self-contained and isolated fields. Art and design was therefore seen as a tool enabling active collaboration with cultural and scientific disciplines.

The Architecture Machine Group led by Nicholas Negroponte produced Seek, a computer-controlled environment inhabited by gerbils as part of Jack Burnham’s 1970 ‘Software’ show in New York.

‘We can communicate – that is, combine and reinforce our knowledge with that of other men – by stimulating the circulation of ideas and feelings, finding channels of communication that can interconnect our disciplines and enable us to see our world as a connective whole.’ György Kepes16

Architecture must Participate
György Kepes once wrote that ‘The dynamic unity of constancy and change has a fundamental role in our intellectual growth. Our clearest understanding of the nature of these complementary opposites has been reached through a grasp of the principle of self-regulating systems.’ Similarly, our own systemic approach seeks to evolve research into new forms of living and the structuring of human environments. Experimenting through explicit models of interactions, observable patterns and proto-animalistic agency, the work within this book explores the capacity for design systems to evolve architectural elements with the capacity to self-structure, respond and evolve. In the process, and beyond deterministic methods of structuring space, issues of duration and populations evolve into a new language of assemblies as collective structures.

Today, with greater opportunities and easier access to information, comes the challenge to re-evaluate the conception and production of architecture. These enabled communication networks have fostered the possibilities for a shared and collective project – one that is not only available to all, but affords a deeper understanding of the world and our participation in it. In engaging with this shared project, it is important to recognise early experiments within this domain, such as those explored by Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT, which dealt with the intimate association of man and machine within architecture, and of Cedric Price, who in collaboration with Joan Littlewood and Gordon Pask designed a Fun Palace that would operate as a time-based architectural machine adapting and evolving through its everyday use. These projects provided a model for the coupling of design and technology while calling for a discourse that is both social and optimistic. Taken together, architecture and design can be seen as a tool that enables an active collaboration within cultural and scientific disciplines. Though not a new pursuit in architecture, it should be recognised that we have greater access to a collective understanding than ever before.

Design should be progressive and challenge people. We should be enabling a diverse set of questions about how we live and the role that architecture can play in our everyday lives. As John Frazer has reminded us, ‘perhaps computing without computers is the most important lesson to be learned by designing these tools. The real benefits are found in having to rethink explicitly and clearly the way in which we habitually do things.’ Architecture today can serve as an emergent framework that displays a new nature, combining the biological, social and computational in an adaptive and evolving organism, reasserting Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s belief that ‘architecture is the continuation of nature in her constructive activity’.

1 Humberto R Maturana, Biology of Cognition, Biological Computer Laboratory Research Report BCL 9.0 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1970).
2 Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
3 György Kepes, The Nature and Art of Motion (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 2.
4 Quoted in Paul Brown et al, eds, White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 37–51.
5 Gordon Pask, ‘The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics’, Architectural Design,
September 1969, 494.
6 Gordon Pask, ‘A Comment, a Case History and a Plan’ (1970) reprinted in J Reichardt, ed, Cybernetic Art and Ideas (London: Studio Vista, 1971), 77.
7 John Frazer, An Evolutionary Architecture (London: Architectural Association
Publications, 1995).
8 Ascott and Pask worked together as part of the Cybernetics Sub-Committee, a consultancy of interdisciplinary minds organised by Pask to assist in the development of Cedric Price’s
Fun Palace.
9 Ascott, op cit note 1.
10 Stephanie Bunbury, ‘It’s time to learn to love your Dalek’, 10 May 2005, retrieved 10 September 2007 from http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/05/09/1115584883777.html
11 Ranulph Glanville, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better: The Cybernetics in Design and the Design in Cybernetics’, Kybernetes 36: 9/10 (2007), 1199.
12 Philip Ball, Shapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
13 Kepes, The Nature and Art of Motion, 6.
14 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago, P Theobald, 1947), 42.
15 Reprinted in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, eds, The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 128–32.
16 Kepes, The Nature and Art of Motion, 6.
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Osaka Expo 70, The Grand Roof and the
Festival Plaza Photo: Shinkenchiku-sha
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One of the critical features of what we call ‘Adaptive Ecologies’ is the attempt to explore generative and behavioural forms of systemic interaction. Arising as a response to accelerated forms of urbanism, this agenda sought to ask if computation could help us to evolve a means to engage with the complex polyscalar relationships within architecture and urbanism today. Beyond issues of masterplanning, we wanted to use computation to examine principles that had the capacity to build relationships on three distinct scales: the masterplan (collective), the block/building (cluster), and the unit. Historically these scales have been treated with a degree of autonomy, but we set out to explore processes that considered them as part of an evolving system or ecology able to respond to uncertainty and latency. At the heart of this work were issues of adaptation and a search for systemic methodologies that would enable us to move toward a time-based and scenario-driven form of urbanism.