Technology&Environment | Grad Dip Stage 1 . Semester 2 . 2008/2009
Tutors: Hocine Bougdah and Nancy Diniz

Output: Technical Portfolio

"Mutant Urban Device" - Modelling Dynamic Behaviour

Architecture more than ever faces challenges of how can one design for a constantly changing world?  The brief for this year stems from these fundamental considerations and the main goal is to define sustainable technical strategies that support design concepts. It calls for the exploration of ecological urban devices to promote the creation of stable, on-going relationships between organic and non-organic systems that will allow urban occupation to operate in sustainable ways.  We aspire to free architecture from subjective and formal approaches, deterministic conceptions that consider it an entity regulated by transcendental geometric rules, forms and proportions. We suggest for example that form can suddenly acquire potential of self-organisation and become generative. Computational evolutionary theories like L-Systems and Cellular Automata were encouraged as self-organisational frameworks for urban occupation.  With these approaches, architecture can go far beyond the resolution of structural or constructive problems as it provides models for dealing with the complex feedbacks that occur between multiple (and indeed often contrasting) forces, like the ones operating in urban contexts. This initiative is concerned with form, structure and material organization across all scales of design thought and practice. Technology must be a raw material interpreted as any physical entity which corresponds and reacts with its environment. 
 Developing “a dynamic urban model” components relates to the development of skills that correspond and will evolve in the 3 following areas: 
1- Mapping and diagramming environmental fields
2- Sustainable strategies
3- Structure/Construction/Fabrication/Materials

HB, ND, Feb 2009

Examples of work:

Elizabeth Lambert

”The potential for growth, as well as the element of surprise as the rules are written enables a framework to be established with exciting results”
"The re-use of this process throughout the building at several scales through material development allows for the presence of self-similarity which again enforces the proposal in systems terms. The patterning and surface making experiments, using the same algorithms produced aesthetically varied results with the same underlying code”.
(Elizabeth Lambert).

Zoe Cox

“By using a generative process for parts of the project, I found this to be a successful way to design. The industrial node branching (L-system) concluded to be a successful way to achieve a condensed use of space through a logical format. For the first stages of the project when researching into stemming and branching as a technical resolution I found this to be quite restricting when attempting to solve the project completely.
Through this process from the start it however became a key aspect in the design development.” (Zoe Cox)

Chris Jennings-Petz

“The technological philosophy was having  evolutionary processes, treating the building as an organism a paramount, key to considering the building as an organism; its consumption of energy. Energy consumption in the everyday use of the building and its embodied material energy has been a driving force behind design development and material selection” (Chris Jennings-Petz)