“As the snow crystal falls it absorbs, captures, or incarnates all the chance events, all the fluctuating conditions (magnetic, gravitational, barometric, electrical, thermal, humidity, speed) and builds them, or rather uses them, to assemble itself, to form its structure or edifice. The snow crystal creates itself in the middle of, and by means of the convergences of, flux. Thus snow crystal morphogenesis is less the result of specific, punctual external causes than a sympathetic but critical insertion within, and the subsequent “cybernetic” management of already present flows. This analytical model—based on developmental pathways, dynamical interactions, singular points, and qualitative movements in abstract, sometimes multidimensional space—arguably furnishes a far richer theory of “site” than most currently employed in orthodox aesthetic or architectural practice.” - Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time:Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture p. 28
COURSE INTRODUCTION
In 1950, only New York and London had over 8 million inhabitants. Today there are 22 megalopolises. Of the 33 megalopolises predicted in 2015, 27 will be located in the least developed countries, including 19 in Asia. As of 2000 around 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities and by 2025 the number is projected to reach 5 billion individuals (two-thirds of which being in poor countries)1. The problems associated with such high density urban centers such as pollution, quality of living, space availability and affordability will no doubt become increasingly more pressing to many new parties as these projected megalopolises emerge throughout the world. At the center of this issue is the skyscraper typology and how it can be re-envisioned, re-engineered, and re-designed beyond its current naive conception as an introverted object to actively couple with, engage, and mediate both man-made and natural ecological webs and flows in a conception of site as rich as that offered in the opening quote by Sanford Kwinter. In other words, how can we rethink the skyscraper in terms of an approach characterized by systems thinking and ecological thinking, an approach which requires the study of both urban and natural ecologies as dynamic and time-based? Further, how can the skyscraper typology be rethought to mediate pollution, reclamate and store water, generate power, provide habitat for humans, flora, and fauna, provide for and foster novel types of public and private space, catalyze or produce new types of program? And how can the skyscraper typology be used as a tuning fork in the urban grid to leverage large scale climatic and social effects in the city and increase the quality of living for the 5 billion residents projected to inhabit these megalopolises in the next 20 years? Finally, what new tools, skill sets, and roles will we need to take on as designer’s to deal with the rich and complex realities of a systems/ecological approach to architecture and urban design, and what new design methodologies will this entail?
FROM THE OBJECT TO THE FIELD
“We are confronted everywhere with emergence in complex adaptive systems – ant colonies, networks of neurons, the immune system, the internet, and the global economy, to name a few – where the behavior of the whole is much more complex than the behavior of the parts.”
– John Holland, Emergence from Chaos to Order
“But a new dimension to fields is emerging……This is the emphasis on self-organization, the capacity of these fields to generate patterns spontaneously without any specific instructions telling them what to do. These systems produce something out of nothing. There is no plan, no blueprint, no instructions about the pattern that emerges. What exists in the field is a set of relationships among the components of the system such that the dynamically steady state into which it goes naturally has temporal and spatial pattern.”
- Brian Goodwin, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots
“Theres no reason to believe that the “everything under control” operating modes that condition the production of urban structures are capable of reflecting the complexities (the intertwining of issues and relational modes) of a mass media society where the multitude of citizens is gradually taking over from the republic’s centralized authorities”. – Francois Roche, (n)certainties biotopes studio Columbia University – Fall 2007
The prodigious birth and growth of megalopolises like New York City has been the result of two major technological revolutions, whose transformations continue to ripple, shape, and diffract through our cities, our politics, our economic milieus, our familial structures, our psychological structures, and our bodies themselves. The first revolution was that of the emergence of the industrial economy, which emerged in the late 18th century and then evolved into the first and second machine age of the early to late twentieth century. The industrial economy in its early stages involved the large scale use of machines to produce commodities and capital instead of human/animal muscle and promulgated novel forms such as mass production processes (Fordism and Taylorism), economies of scale, the factory, the factory town, distribution systems like the railroad, a new entrepreneurial class (bourgeoisie), a new working class, and an intensification of urbanization never before seen. The industrial economy then matured into the first and second machine age of the early to late twentieth century characterized by the miniaturization and diffusion of machines from the exclusive domain of the factory and into the daily material living of society virtually disappearing behind our walls, decorative coverings, and even our own skin. Throughout the 19th century and most of the twentieth the deleterious logics of the industrial economy would literally shape and carve our cities for better or worst, and equally and perhaps more perniciously, shape our conception of ourselves and remake our view of the world within the conceptual model of the machine (reductionism and mechanism). The reductionist logics of the machine and the factory, in which every system is seen as nothing more than the sum of its parts and parts are fetishized to the exclusion of their interrelation, would come to dominate our views of self, society, the city, and our relation to the environment, leading to dysfunction in all these realms; i.e. the body, the social body, and the urban body in terms of occupational disease, alienation, and environmental pollution. Under the logics of the machine systems and ecologies, which have to do more with the relations between things than the things themselves, fell through the cracks as fluid, dynamic, and interconnected ecological/relational webs constituting both natural and man-made phenomena were torn apart, boxed-up, fragmented, linearized, and statically frozen under the machine model to disastrous environmental effects and affects.
The industrial economy and the machine model has now given way in many parts of the world to a new entity which promulgates a logic of networks and radical interconnection, that of the information based economy. The revolution of the information economy is characterized by the shift from an economy based on export of objects to an economy based on the export of ideas, softwares, designs, entertainment, and other informational structures driven by the proliferation of personal pc’s and the worldwide web. This shift is also characterized by the transition from work powered by muscle to that of nerve work, or thought intensive work. The information economy is underpinned by radical paradigm shifts in science that started in the 1940’s with the development of information theory, cybernetics, general systems theory, network theory, and complexity theory. All of which did the following: prioritized the study of systems and their interconnections over discreet objects, or prioritized the field condition over the object; declared that the whole cannot always be reduced to or predicted by the sum of its parts and identified such unpredictable phenomena as emergent phenomena; made a distinction between bottom-up systems which self-organize in a de-centralized way (i.e. sand dunes, crowd formations, and some financial markets), from that of top-down systems which are assembled through centralized control (i.e. machine assemblies and corporations). The informational economy and the informational paradigm associated with it consequently shifted the focus away from objects to field conditions, from an emphasis on isolated objects to the communication between objects in an evolving ecology, from centralized control (hard control) to decentralized self-organizing dynamics (soft control), from hierarchies to networks, from stasis to growth, from the closed systems of mechanism to open evolving ones, and from re-presenting reality with pen and paper to simulating reality in virtual environments. Through the epistemological lense of network theory and complexity theory the city reveals itself as being comprised of mobile networks of agents (people) connected into complex social and technological ecologies, as being invested and shaped by both bottom-up (human brains, traffic jams, crowds) and top-down (zoning) phenomena, as being a node itself in larger transnational networks subject to the ebb and flow of people, energy, commodities, and information which regulate and steer its evolution and growth. In short, through the lense of network theory and complexity theory the city reveals itself as a complex adaptive system and not a wind-up watch.
FROM REPRESENTATION TO SIMULATION
“Mapping is a fantastic cultural project, creating and building the world as much as measuring and describing it. [....] As a creative practice, mapping precipitates its most productive effects through a finding that is also a founding; its agency lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds. Thus mapping unfolds potential.” – James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and invention, from Mappings, Ed. Denis Cosgrove, Reaktion Books, London, 1999
In urban an architectural discourse and methodology, the machine model promulgated methods of representation that were good at isolating and framing static objects, so methods like figure-ground analysis, the nolli plan, and planametric projection drawing techniques pervaded, all techniques which are still widely used as
fundamental drivers of design. These tools fetishize edges, boundaries, and form to the exclusion of the space in between and the flows which populate and condition that space whether they be temperature gradients, light levels, air flows, water flows, acoustic phenomena, odors, electromagnetic (i.e. wireless signals), or social.
Under the machine model urban design also suffered as architects took on the central planning dogma of machine design and applied it to the master planning of entire cities under the specious formalizing rules of one rigid totalizing idea or another. Just as at the architectural scale, the machine paradigm failed to account for the rich ecological webs, both man-made and natural, already existing in and through a site, as well as, those that may emerge as the city grows, consequently fetishizing objects over systems, and thus straight-jacketing future urban growth under the rubrics and platonic geometries of one top-down idea or another. These conceptual and representational relics of the machine model are obsolete an inadequate to drive a modern design approach based on time-dependent systems and ecological thinking. They must be left behind as tools that have outlived any generative usefulness in architecture or urbanism in exchange for tools that can map, visualize, and simulate the dynamic and interconnected nature of natural and cultural ecologies.
The consequences of the paradigm shift from the mechanistic-industrial to the informational-network order and the proliferation of its associated technologies across the urban field, are staggering for architectural and urban design, both in terms of the new social realities enabled and produced by wireless technologies and handheld pc’s (peer-to-peer networking, GPS, etc..), and in terms of the new tools emerging for the analysis of urban and architectural systems. These new tools for design come in the form of computer aided design and manufacturing systems that can allow designers to visualize and map data previously ignored, generate ecologically responsive designs, and rapid-prototype those designs for further analysis or construction. The introduction of these computational tools consequently marks the shift from representation to simmulation in architectural design, or from an era of making tracings to one of map making.
Throughout the term we will endeavor to theorize site and the city as a complex adaptive system and in so doing appropriate new skill sets and technologies that allow us to visualize and have new agency with these time-dependent systems. We will also explore how this technology displaces the role of the architect, engineer, and contractor into productive new territories; for example the phenomena of architects taking on roles that were previously occupied by engineers through the use of structural analysis softwares; or the changing role of the contractor as an on-site assembler of pre-fitted parts due to the use computer aided manufacturing processes. As with the introduction of any new technology, new economic and disciplinary niches unfold, as well as, new objects of study (digital-material hybrids, softwares) and new definitions for what architects or engineers do. This studio will embed itself in these issues and explore the new territories information technology affords architectural theory, design method, and the future role of the architect.
Terms to Google:
scale free network, ecology, reductionism, topology, emergence, self-organization, morphogenesis, vertical farm, bio-lung, green wall, search space, phase portrait, bio-politic, animism, transformism, hybridization, biotopes, in vitro/Vivo, post-humanism, multitudes, bottom up, game of life, cellula automata, dynamic simulation, pattern recognition, ecosogy, genotype, phenotype, adaptation, growth, parametric, proccedure, protocol, routine, scripting, algorithm, L-system, neural network, recursion, fractals, stochastic, genetic algorithm……….
scritping resources:
https://wiki.umn.edu/view/DigitalDesignAssemblage/WebHome
http://www.arch.columbia.edu/gsap/17523////
http://highend3d.com/
http://www.proxyarch.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://www.nickpisca.com/go
http://biothing.org/wiki/doku.php
digital based design practices, wiki’s, and blogs:
http://www.ocean-north.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
http://www.kokkugia.com/
http://ncertainties.wordpress.com/
http://b.durandin.free.fr/iveheardabout/iha.htm
http://www.new-territories.com/
http://www.theverymany.net/
http://www.scriptedbypurpose.net/
http://mit.edu/edgsrc/www/#
http://www.evolutionary-strategies.org/
http://www.emergentarchitecture.com/projects.php?id=7
skyscraper ‘08 competition:
http://www.evolo-arch.com/
useful videos:
Alain Badiou _ Democracy, Politics, Theory, and Philosophy
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0C54FA6AC226C551
Manuel De Landa _ The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D649C765D91C1120
Paul Virilio _ Dromology and Claustrophobia
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0E36B727EAFCB31D
The Diagram
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBvaHZIrt0o
