Architecture In-Play, Future Challenges

2010

Although the most important reasons for designing digitally-driven kinetic architectural structures seem to be practical ones, namely functional flexibility and adaptation to changing conditions and needs, this paper argues that there is possibly an additional socio-cultural aspect driving their design and construction. Through this argument, the paper attempts to debate their status and question their concepts and practices. Looking at the design explorations and discourses of real or visionary technologically-augmented architecture since the 1960s, one cannot fail to notice the use of biological metaphors and concepts to describe them – an attempt to ‘naturalise’ them which culminates today in the conception of kinetic structures and intelligent environments as literally ‘alive’. Examining these attitudes in contemporary examples, the paper demonstrates that digitally-driven kinetic structures can be conceived as artificial ‘living’ machines that undermine the boundary between the...

Colours, toys and light are the basis of our research. The design of the technology is one of the major innovation in architecture of the last ten years. We apply this principle to urban design and sustainable architecture. The mechanical and technological systems are the very centre of contemporary design and these must be managed aesthetically. A colored building is a symbolical building: in this way architecture will achieve a new role, thanks to its presence and it will not need any external lighting: it will send its own light and colours, and will dialogue with people and with the city. Our spaces are marked by some symbolical figures, typical of the toys world. The colour, considered untidy in a neoplastic matrix lines (from Mondrian to El Lisitskij), draw new furniture built to be like a toy, even before being volumes designed to contain things. The relation between objects and toys become strictly dualistic: it’s not a simple container, it should be a toy that contains others object-toys (a kind of “matrioska”). In this context other objects-toys are relaxing toys, but also working toys. This is why Toys is at the very heart of our project, and the whole school complex has been designed using the shapes and colours of children's games. Identifiable from afar, the school stands out from its rural surroundings thanks to the movement of the roofing (at times rotating thanks to photovoltaic panels that track the sun, other times becoming a mere sail-like covering). Ultimately, these iridescent roofs which alternate higher and lower volumes, horizontal, with vertical and slating lines, hark back to that image of a city we see epitomized in paintings from the XIII and XIV centuries right up to the early Italian Renaissance. Another important inspiration for this intervention were the seaside colonies constructed along the Adriatic Riviera during the first half of the XX century. In addition, we alluded to two of James Stirling’s projects: the Olivetti Training School at Haslemere (Surrey), and the Southgate Housing at Runcorn New Town. In order to define a credible integration between Architecture and Nature (where Nature plays a seminal role in the life of a student, between toy and discovery), the buildings were designed from a planimetric point of view as a series of parallel bars of varying lengths and widths. The longitudinal links to the plot are varieties of pathways inside/outside the buildings (pavements grafted onto the interconnecting areas between the main structures) which trace out a web of pedestrian passageways. The continuity of routes, running all the way through the building, means there is no real distinction between the constructed and Nature, on the contrary it seems as though the constructed is some kind of artificial wrinkling of the earth. In addition these routes become visual sights trained on the landscape in between the buildings. The gentle wrinklings of the earth along the buildings' which help the disposition of the volumes to be assimilated by the horizontal rural landscape, as well as becoming places to let the students play and study in safety. There is no real main entrance, but from all of the internal pathways it is possible to access the buildings via glass doors: this expedient makes the use of the spaces flexible and sectional, allowing the various features to be used separately, also by spur-of-the-moment users. As extensive study of tracking solar panels allowed us to incorporate the most up-to-date technology on the market into the building's architecture. The turning cubic roofs each feature an average of 100 sm of exposed panels with double rotation gear - horizontal and vertical - so as to adapt themselves like a sunflower to the position of the sun. In addition the panels include not only photovoltaic cells but also solar heating, so as to produce hot water and electricity, thus making the buildings fully self-sustaining. References - Giotto, Cacciata dei diavoli da Arezzo, Assisi - Benozzo Gozzoli, Cacciata dei demoni da Arezzo, Arezzo - Clemente Busiri Vici, Colonia Marina “Le Navi” (XXVIII Ottobre), Cattolica (RN) - J. Stirling, Olivetti Training School, Haslemere Surey 1969 - J. Stirling, Southgate Housing, Runcorn New Town 1972 - Fausto Pagnamenta - Neeresh, Cromoterapia per bambini, Edizioni del Cigno 1996

2008

Two innovations have more deeply changed the building process: the operational continuity of the design and construction phases and the software allowing not only the representation but also the autonomous creation of complex shapes never before thought, just because they could not be represented. This last innovation introduce to a “Performative Architecture” that addresses to emerge a new kind of architecture. Building performances (structural, environmental, energetic) are guiding design principles, adopting new building performance-based priorities for the design of cities, buildings and landscape. This emerging architecture places broadly defined performance above form making; It utilises digital technologies of quantitative and qualitative performance-based simulation to offer a comprehensive approach to the design of the build environment. Some aspects of “Performative Architecture” theories are critically examined and we report two experiments made using these procedures. Th...

This paper addresses the sub-theme of Modern Practices by considering the legacy of Corbusierism in the design methods of architecture. In an attempt to go beyond Corbusierism we follow a critique of Le Corbusier by Lewis Mumford. In his objection to the peculiar version of Corbusier's modernism as it is evident in his architecture, Mumford finds a romantic utopian vision that does not address the scale of human activity. We interpret this vision as borne of humanism, i.e. the belief in technological progress and its potential to solve all human problems. One way to go beyond Corbusierism is to go beyond this humanism. The resources are found in the philosophical and social theories of Bruno Latour and some feminist theorists such as Karen Barad, Judith Butler etc. These theories are generally referred under the umbrella term of posthumanism, which call for a performative understanding of the human. Mumford himself finds the city as the theater of social action. Our effort is to apply these theoretical advances to architectural design methods. In this paper we describe a new tool based on performance for the ideation phase of the architectural design process. 'Performative Tools' is a method being developed in the 'User-Centered Design' methodology, in the Scandinavian tradition. The architectural practice in India is still predominantly influenced by the image of the international modern architecture style. Very little or no effort is made to explore the indigenous architecture arising out of the Indian social fabric. We attempt to propose a modern design practice which will incorporate the user in the design process for achieving the anticipated result. We describe our experiments with 'Performative Tools' from the workshops conducted with architecture students. The paper elaborates on the valuable insights it can provide in the ideation process. We prescribe a format for the workshop to be conducted and Architects role as a coordinator and moderator of the workshop.

[From the dust jacket] Peter Exley and Sharon Exley are teachers, educative designers, and generators of good ideas; together they have amassed an impressive portfolio of interactive environments for children. Their firm, architectureisfun, develops architecture, interiors, exhibits, and learning resources for clients interested in sensorial and enlightened experiences as part of daily life. This publication examines architectureisfun's unique methodology that integrates architecture, learning, design and experience in its award-winning projects designed specifically for children. Kids on the Fly at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport is one such project. This soaring exhibit received an American Institute of Architects Interior Architecture Award and is recognised for its universality, accessibility, safety, and design. It is just one of the inventive, original and memorable projects included in this book.

National Conference on the Beginning Design Student 37, 2022

Open source development frameworks have revolutionized the way designers of all disciplines develop software, hardware, carry out research, and even fund projects. Led by the “Maker Movement“ and made possible by open source hardware and software, these readily available and non-proprietary rapid-prototyping technologies substantially lower the barrier of entry to the research and development of complex integrated systems, in both the physical and digital realms. To engage in this type of integrative making requires fundamental technical skills drawing from multiple disciplines including physical/digital fabrication and prototyping, digital/parametric modeling, mechanical engineering and design, as well as electrical engineering and circuit prototyping. For the aspiring design student, these unfamiliar topics can be significant hurdles to entering this fertile ground of design exploration. This paper serves up for comparison two separate approaches taken in course offerings that engage these issues, one in a research seminar context, one in a design studio/workshop context. Students were asked to explore the design, simulation and fabrication of kinetic architectural prototypes, responsive building systems, and intelligent skins. Using Grasshopper, Firefly and the Arduino microcontroller as creative and technical tools, students were taught fundamental skills in electronical and mechanical prototyping to complement existing skills in digital modeling/fabrication. Starting out with simple sensors and actuator movements, students eventually developed a kinetic prototype that evolves and adapts to specific architectural desires. These were built as “actual-scale” physical/mechanical/electronical prototypes, accompanied with speculative drawings for deployment at an architectural scale. Specific issues were identified both in the subject matter as well as advantages/disadvantages in course delivery structure. Students struggled with issues of scale in terms of projecting and adapting their prototypes to architectural assemblies at full scale, specifically the tectonic as well as mechanical and material implications of scaling up. Another primary learning experience was the realization that substantial iterative testing and prototyping needs to be an integral part of the development process. While models, drawings, and representation of architectural space can be abstract, fuzzy, and left open to interpretation, the precision and exactness required to make things work mechanically and electronically is literal and unforgiving; it either works or it doesn’t. Substantial time was spent dealing with mechanical issues of tolerance and friction, as well as developing control logics and linking electronic components in relation to one another. Regarding the educational experience, parallels can be drawn with traditional 1:1 design/build projects where issues of budget, size, structure, scheduling, and constructability are at the forefront. This version of the relationship has more to do with issues of precision, experimentation and verification through iteration, while dealing with “real” mechanical and electronical materials in an alternate 1:1 sense. The overall pedagogical goal is to instill within students a “Maker” mentality of making things work on a technical level all the while maintaining criticality from a design viewpoint. This interweaving of techniques from multiple disciplines compares similarly to the integrative skills architects are required to wield in real practice, as well as the increasingly multi-disciplinary world of the future that requires agile thought, integration, and adaptation.

CAAD education has traditionally focused on delivering skills related to specific software tools. With today’s abundance of computational methods and systems, this approach has proven to be flawed in terms of its learning outcomes. One of the growing areas of computational design, which has not adequately received sufficient attention in CAAD curricula, is responsive and kinetic architecture. Compared to other constituents of an architectural project, a pedagogical approach to designing systems such as responsive structures or kinetic façade systems requires much more than the typical knowledge and skill set. It extends to include a variety of components such as digital fabrication and making, physical computing, parametric modeling and generative design, kinematics and motion, and material exploration, to name only a few. Attempts to integrate the design of kinetic structures in education go back as early as 1970, but more involving product than process (Zuk and Clark, 1970). More recent pedagogical attempts include the work of Fox and Hu (2005), which focused on a bottom-up approach of designing mechanical structures then adding sensors and actuators to produce full scale responsive environments. Other efforts, such as El-Zanfaly (2011), provide basic guidelines for designing kinetic structures based on shape and motion grammars. Efforts that followed include intensive workshops or brief course modules. This paper aims at a more comprehensive integration of designing responsive systems as a pedagogical approach in architectural design studio. We propose a framework for designing responsive systems in design studio that incorporates learning by doing (Ozkar, 2007), making in design (Blikstein, 2013) and sensorial computing. We hypothesize that integrating the learning of these systems in studio enhances student perception of spatial quality, mechanism and structural integrity, behavior and time, in addition to attention to scale, detail and connections, therefore informing the design process at both the architectural and urban design level.

LIVENARCH 6st International Congress Proceedings Volume II, 2019

Based on the idea that can contribute to the development of a learning-oriented education strategy, it can be said that the design idea is constantly trying to discontinue from the usual productions and explore alternative areas. Awareness concept is a meaningful axis of this situation which can be viewed from many different angles. The relatively priority problem for the newcomer in design education is to comprehend the act of awareness. The discoveries and findings on the environment in which he lives, the events involving the whole of society and the actors who realize all of these constitute the definition of the field of awareness of the individual. The expansions in this environment where everything is questioned prepare the ground for new and multifaceted perspectives. Experiencing, resuscitation and flexibility of play manifest multiple potentials in the development of awareness discovery. Besides the play fiction contains a number of routers such as purpose, rule and space, it creates an environment in which the idea of architecture is re-discussed. In this direction; The architectural design studio, which was held in the spring semester of 2019 in Van YYU architecture department, was designed as a laboratory to reveal the relationship between play and awareness through a series of concepts. These concepts which are population growth, migration, crisis, survival, integration, transformation, belonging, memory, mobility, placelessness, mediocrity and possibility try to make initiatives that emphasize social changes. The play created by each group in the studio invents and plays alternative speculations of these concepts. This situation allows discussion and development of the area of awareness in architectural design education.