This is less a question to be answered directly, but rather a provocation for a conceptual business model for the continuation of the architectural profession. I believe that this concept is interesting for the professional practice in that practices are interested both in the innovation of the built environment and the longevity of the profession itself. I would, therefore, not be looking for a direct answer, but rather a moment of reflection for the future of the architectural profession and how we [architypes] might secure our longevity and relevance in a dynamic and ever-changing political and economic landscape.

With the future uncertainties of the architectural profession, among many other trades, in lieu of a declining economy, it appears to be critical to rethink current business models (relationship between architects/clients/cities/etc.) that limit the discipline to a confined linear model. It is important to note precedents in other fields whom are ahead of the economic curve despite recessions and ever-changing cultural climates. Two trends I believe architectural practice could be doing more to take advantage of (both for internal monetary gain and overall building performance); cloud-computing and the media-driven frenzy of “the green movement”. These movements can be better leveraged to finance sustainable building research and digital innovations.

This year, Boeing will no longer sell jet engines; rather they will lease them, so that overtime they may continually monitor the performance of the jet engines from larger ranges as opposed to only monitoring an individual engine—where little information can be gathered compared to the emergent information that will be seen from looking at the entire field of engines within the world. As a business model this allows them to have access to a continuous flow of finances from both a product and service. Their monitoring not only allows them to see in real-time the performance of their product/design, but how to better re-design future engines—which will undoubtedly lead to patentable products/designs.

Similarly, this type of business model can be seen in relation to another profession that was at once losing out on it services/product due to piracy and outsourced/generic models—mass-media: music, videos and software. To combat the problem of piracy, in conjunction with novel ideas of distributed networking and cloud computing, allowed software companies to hold on to their product while the users merely tap into this continuous stream of product. This allows both the company to monitor the popularity and profitability of their services (the performance) and also allows for a continuous stream of financial income by increasing their web-of-influence. To increase longevity, as do species in biological nature fighting for survival, increased their diversity and stretched their web-of-influence within their ecology.

These examples are interesting models considering the current developer-driven atmosphere that the architectural profession is now immersed. Architectural studios/firms developed under this model would operate under a research and design model where research is simulated and tested for architectural solutions on real-world projects, where clients are actively sought-out to lease a product (the building) to the client in need, and continue to monitor the product throughout its life-cycle to ensure building performance sustainability. This would allow the profession to take a lead role in the enhancement of building performance through quantitative and qualitative monitoring—where currently we lack real-time quantitative data to back up our computer simulated data of building performance. This would produce valuable information for the sustainability of built environment through a greater understanding by way of data–as a scientific and technological vantage through the increased data afforded by the monitoring of multiple buildings in the environment. This type of model might, in fact, be a more pleasurable model considering the changing sociocultural landscape for those seeking rapid exchanges/transactions (mobility as opposed to stability/lease as opposed to outright ownership). The second cultural shift affecting this movement is the increased call for sustainable technologies over the lifecycle of a product [decreased carbon footprint and waste reduction] and the increased monitoring, simulating, and tracking of every known product and service in both the present and past.

In addition to the beneficial gain in knowledge through greater understanding of our environment by way of the monitoring, sensing, and simulation, during a time when large fluctuations of instability in the global economy shifts the architectural profession through troughs and peaks, creating a web of interdependence that would be too great between the two for either to be pulled apart— co evolving into a symbiotic relationship.

The contemporary city is characterized by highly integrated and interdependent systems. More than ever this complex weave of bits and atoms demands the application of an eco-systemic methodology to architectural and urban analysis, digital design, fabrication and production. In this context, an emerging ecology of digital tools and techniques now allow designers to craft synthetic relationships and blur distinctions between the digital and the physical, between the natural and artificial, and between performance simulation and real-world analysis. These synthetic digital ecologies thrive at the intersection of creative and technical domains whose boundaries are elastic and continuously evolving. Navigating this dynamic terrain requires modes of synthetic reasoning in order to advance to advance design research and digital innovation. What are the implications for architecture, landscape, the city and beyond? What are the spatial, material and organizational possibilities? How do these influence the social, cultural and political life of cities?

The conference co-chairs seek papers and projects that highlight experimental research and explore the reciprocity and synergy between bits and atoms, the digital and the physical, and digital code and material logic. ACADIA 2012 will bring together designers, academics and practitioners who engage, question and aspire to stretch these boundaries. Architects, fabricators, engineers, media artists, technologists, software developers, hackers and others in related fields of inquiry are invited to submit works that explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

-Responsive environments; sensing, real-time computation, actuation and feedback
-Synthetic fabrication and robotic craft; new paradigms in rapid prototyping and assembly
-Energy, form, performance modeling, simulation and prototyping
-Synthetic tectonics; composite materials, smart assemblies, emerging trends
-Virtual environments; gaming; social networking; interaction and collaboration
-Computational models of complex systems in design; emergent and self-organizing systems
-Dynamic information modeling & design (body / building / landscape / urban micro-climate scales)
-History and theory of digital architecture and synthetic production.

-ACADIA 2012

The qualities of an emergent city

The adoption of mass-production processes, or development, in substitution for spontaneous urban growth in the mid-20th century created for the first time a phenomenon of alienation between the inhabitants and their environment. While the physical features of spontaneous cities could be traced to complex histories of families, businesses, and organizations, the physical features of planned cities owe their origin only to the act of planning and speculation. This has severe consequences towards the sustainability of place as there will not grow any particular attachment by the residents, their presence there being only a temporary economic necessity and not the outcome of their life’s growth. Mass-production of the environment left people as nothing more than consumers of cities where they used to be their creators. A building culture was replaced with a development industry, leaving the landscape culture-less and with no particular sense of identity. This took place despite the evidence that a building which has a unique history and has been fitted to someone’s life, as opposed to speculatively produced, generates market value for that property. (Alexander, 1975) This is why, although the demolition of so-called “slums” to replace them with modern housing projects created a great deal of opposition against urban renewal programs, the demolition of the housing projects later on did not lead to a popular preservationist opposition. They were not the physical expression of any culture.

In additional to cultural patterns, spontaneous settlements also have a peculiar morphology that has not successfully been imitated by modern growth processes. Spontaneous settlement processes give individuals full freedom to determine the boundaries of their properties. Spontaneous settlement is one where total randomness in building configuration is allowed, with no pre-determined property lines acting as artificial boundaries. Buildings and building lots as such acquire general configurations comparable to cell structure in living tissues, unique sizes and boundaries that are purely adapted to the context in which they were defined. In the absence of abstract property boundaries, property rights are bounded by real physical limits such as a neighbor’s wall. (Hakim, 2007)

Very attractive spontaneous cities have a specific pattern of the urban tissue. It consists of similar vernacular buildings that appear very simple when considered individually, but produce a visually fascinating landscape when considered as a whole. This is a form of fractal geometry. In mathematics a fractal is a geometric object of infinite scale that is defined recursively, as an equation or computation that feeds back on itself. For example the Sierpinski triangle is defined by three triangles taking the place of one triangle as in figure 4.

The Mandelbrot Set is a much more interesting fractal that is defined as a simple recursive mathematical equation, yet requires a computation to visualize in its full complexity. When computing how many cycles of feedback it takes for the equation to escape to infinity for specific coordinates, figure 5 is the outcome.

In addition to its remarkable similarity to natural phenomena, this form of geometric order informs us of a very important law in geometry: a feedback loop that is fed through the same function will produce an ordered but unpredictable geometric pattern out of any random input.

This tells us why cities of vernacular buildings have such appealing geometric properties at the large scale, despite being often shabby and improvised at the scale of individual buildings. Shanties made of scrap metal and tarp look rough at the scale of the material, but because multiple shanties share the construction process and originate from similar feedback conditions they form an ordered geometric pattern with its specific “texture”. The same process takes place at other scales of feedback, for example the production of a door. Whether the input for one door is larger, taller, wider than another door, if the same production process is employed the two doors will contribute to the overall fractal order of the urban space. This law has been employed not only in traditional and spontaneous cities, but also for modern urban planning initiatives. In the New York City neighborhood of Times Square the structure of billboard advertisements is defined by a building code that determines their configuration in relation to the configuration of the building. The outcome is a unique tissue of advertisement billboards that has become more characteristic of the neighborhood than the buildings themselves, which are not produced by a shared feedback function.

Fundamentals of urban complexity

Christopher Alexander showed in A City is not a Tree (Alexander, 1965) that social and economic networks formed complex semi-lattice patterns, but that people who observed them limited their descriptions to a simple mathematical tree of segregated parts and sub-parts, eliminating connections in the process. (Figure 6 compares the structure of a tree and semi-lattice.) In attempting to plan for urban structure, a single human mind, without a supporting computational process, falls back on tree structures to maintain conceptual control of the plan, thus computing below spontaneous urban complexity, a phenomenon that is consistent with Wolfram’s theory of computational irreducibility of complex systems. (Computational irreducibility states that the only accurate description of a complex system is the system itself and that no abstraction or reduction to a simpler process is possible.) Nikos A. Salingaros later detailed the laws of urban networks in Theory of the Urban Web. (Salingaros, 1998) Network connections form between nodes that are complementary, and therefore the complexity of networks depends on an increasing diversity of nodes. Salingaros describes the urban web as a system that is perpetually moving and growing, and in order to do this the urban tissue has to grow and move with it. Consider for example the smallest social network, the family. Debate over accessory units or “granny flats” has intensified as normal aging has forced the elderly out of their neighborhoods and into retirement complexes, while at the other end of the network young adults entering higher education or the labor market vanish from a subdivision, leaving a large homogeneous group of empty-nesters occupying what was once an area full of children, and often forcing school closures (a clear expression of unsustainability).

These social networks grow more complex with increasing building density, but a forced increased in density does not force social networks to grow more complex. For instance the spontaneous settlements of slums in the developing world show remarkable resilience that authorities have had difficulty acknowledging. Because of squalid living conditions authorities have conducted campaigns to trade property in the slum for modern apartments with adequate sanitary conditions. To the authorities’ befuddlement some of the residents later returned to live in the slum in order to once again enjoy the rich social networks that had not factored in the design of the modern apartments and neighborhoods, demonstrating that the modern neighborhoods were less socially sustainable than the slums.

In commercial networks, space syntax research (Hillier, 1996), using a method for ranking nodes of semi-lattice networks, has shown that shops spontaneously organize around the multiple scales of centrality of the urban grid at its whole, creating not only commercial centers but a hierarchy of commercial centers that starts with sporadic local shops along neighborhood centers and goes all the way to a central business district located in the global center of the spatial network. The distribution of shops is therefore a probabilistic function of centrality in the urban grid. Because the information necessary to know one’s place in the hierarchy of large urban grids exceeds what is available at the design stage, and because any act of extension or transformation of the grid changes the optimal paths between any two random points of the city, it is only possible to create a distribution of use through a feedback process that begins with the grid’s real traffic and unfolds in time.

The built equilibrium

Although they may appear to be random, new buildings and developments do not arise randomly. They are programmed when the individuals who inhabit a particular place determine that the current building set no longer provides an acceptable solution to environmental conditions, some resulting from external events but some being the outcome of the process of urban growth itself. It is these contextual conditions that fluctuate randomly and throw the equilibrium of the building set out of balance. In order to restore this equilibrium there will be movement of the urban tissue by the addition or subtraction of a building or other structure. In this way an urban tissue is a system that fluctuates chaotically, but it does so in response to random events in order to restore its equilibrium.

This explains why spontaneous cities achieve a natural, “organic” morphology that art historians have had so much difficulty to describe. Every step in the movement of a spontaneous city is a local adaptation in space and time that is proportional to the length of the feedback loops and the scale of the disequilibrium. For spontaneous cities in societies that experience little change the feedback loops are short and the scale of disequilibrium small, and so the urban tissue will grow by adding sometimes as little as one room at a time to a building. Societies experiencing rapid change will produce very large additions to the urban tissue. For example, the skyscraper index correlates the construction of very tall buildings with economic boom-times, and their completion with economic busts. The physical presence of a skyscraper is thus the representation of a major disequilibrium that had to be resolved. (Thornton, 2005) The morphology of this change is fractal in a similar way that the movement of a stock market is, a pattern that Mandelbrot has studied. In general we can describe the property of a city to adapt to change as a form of time-complexity, where the problems to be solved by the system at one point in time are different from those to be solved at a later point in time. The shorter the time-span between urban tissue transformations, meaning the shorter the feedback loops of urban growth, the closer to equilibrium the urban tissue will be at any particular point in time.

Modern urban plans do not include a dimension of time, and so cannot enable the creation of new networks either internally or externally. They determine an end-state whose objective is to restore a built equilibrium through a large, often highly speculative single effort. They accomplish this by creating a large-scale node on existing networks. In order for such a plan to be attempted the state of disequilibrium in the built environment must have grown large enough to justify the immense expense of the new plan. This is why development will concentrate very large numbers of the same building program in one place, whether it is a cluster of 1000 identical single-family homes or a regional shopping mall, just like the skyscraper concentrates multiple identical floors in one place. Demand for these buildings has become so urgent that they can find a buyer despite the absence of local networks, the standardized building plan, or the monotonous setting. This is not as problematic for large cities for which a single subdivision is only a small share of the total urban fabric, but for smaller towns the same project can double the size of the urban fabric and overshoot the built equilibrium into an opposite and severe disequilibrium.

The mixed-used real estate development has attempted to recreate the sustainable features of the spontaneous city by imitating the morphology of sustainable local economic networks. It has not reintroduced the time dimension in economic network growth. Often this has resulted in a commercial sector that serves not the local neighborhood but the larger region first, consistent with the commercial sector being a product of large-scale economic network disequilibrium. In other developments the commercial sectors have struggled and been kept alive through subsidies from residential development, which is evidence of its unsustainability as part of the system.

-Source

-Parametric exploration; manipulation of polyline control points.

Jessica Rosencrantz & Jesse Louis-Rosenberg of Nervous System spoke on Growing Objects at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design Lecture Series on November 1, 2011.

-Source
-Nervous System

The Complex and the Singular
..excerpt from Sanford Kwinter’s, Architectures of Time

To understand the precise mechanics of how a form may be “time- and difference-generated” –or actualized in the jargon of the present argument — consider the example of the domestic ice cube versus the free-form snow crystal. Is time real for the cube in the same way as for the snow crystal? How do their respective forms arise? In the former case a cubic slot is prepared and preformed in plastic or metal and filled with water. It is placed in an environment where cold is able to penetrate it from the outside, first fixing its boundaries in conformity with its geometric receptacle, later simply filling out its interior. Every ice cube resembles every other just as it resembles its own mother mold. There is no real time to be found in this system, as almost nothing is permitted to flow (save for heat, though along a rigidly controlled gradient); everything is locked into a static spatial system that reproduced pregiven form. All the aleatory conditions, all of chance, hazard, all virtuality and sensitivity to other disturbances and changes in the environment –all wildness and openness–are scrupulously (i.e., by design) eliminated.

The snow crystal is different. Its genesis is dynamic and can be situated initially at the convergence of three distinct fluxes: mica and mineral particles; a moisture saturated field; and a thermal flow of heat exchange. One does not know in advance where or when such a crystal will begin to nucleate or form, but one knows it will emerge–apparently spontaneously–from a flux or convergence of flows, not in a prepared form or space. The form of the crystal, however, is not fixed from the beginning–it is merely an incarnated singularity, a speck of dust-ice, that has been carried to a new level where it interacts with higher-order flows–gravity, wind, barometric pressure, humidity, other silicate dust, water, crystals, and thermal and even acoustic flows, plus electrical and magnetic gradients. All of these conditions vary continually in relation to themselves and affect the snowflake’s trajectory. The crystal does carry some fixed information along with it–its pre-established molecular structure, developed within a rigid tetrahedral lattice of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, determines the even formation of hexagonal plates with six “inflextions” or surface asperities. This apparently “regular” architecture produces a dynamically irregular space, causing certain regions on the hexagonal matrix to catch more than their share of the external weather conditions. The resulting build-up takes place disproportionately on these humps, so that the snow crystal will always have six sides.

Of course this inflexible part of its “program” may be said to transcend time; yet this aspect is hardly what is compelling about snow crystal morphology. What is interesting is that despite its partially fixed matrix no two results are ever alike. Each is different because the crystal maintains its sensitivity both to time and to its complex milieu. Its morphogenetic principle is active and always incomplete (i.e., evolving)–the snowflake interacts with other processes, across both space and time; it belongs to a dynamical, fluvial world. 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.

-Source

-Concept installation; lightweight parametric surface undulating above a thick atmosphere induced with varying luminous layers.

Daisy Ginsberg, designer, artist and writer, explores the social, ethical and cultural implications of emerging technologies, especially synthetic biology. Her projects open up a creative space to imagine the potential scientific triumphs and disasters on the horizon.

-Synthetic Aesthetics

As I look through the previous winning and submitted entries to the eVolo skyscraper competition I cannot help but feel the plasticity and corporatization of a competition whose topic of discourse weighs so heavily on the importance of possible future city dwelling scenarios. In contrast to truly challenging multiple aspects of vertical dwelling, entrants are instead quick to slap on the latest “sustainable” technologies to the facade of a formally fetishized mega-structure. Since its inception eVolo has traditionally been a [skyscraper] competition seemingly focused on the instantaneously digestible image. Although some projects stray away from this generalization, and may in fact have a great deal of research behind the fantastical gloss that somehow eludes the captive audience, what is presented on the eVolo blog, and often filtered out to the final round, are those projects embodying the recognizably-gratifying-image to be most easily transmitted and disseminated in a media culture hooked on the quickest and cheapest visual fix bearing little to no substance to hold them up.

A large number of the projects displayed deal with the challenge only by addressing “sustainability” through a gauntlet of the latest gadgetry, fixated on a montage of renewable energy gathering devices. Nearly all geographic regions have been exhausted; coastal areas, sea/oceanic surfaces, mountains, the north pole, dense urban cities, underwater, space, floating within the atmosphere, virtual space, and even the seventh realm–digital space-time mutation…all carrying the same superficial gratification as the next.

In addition there has been a bevy of digitally gluttonous projects feeding off of the latest algorithmic “fads”; aggregations, packing, cracking, fractal, flocking, voronoi tessellations, boulder algorithms, minimal surfaces, and the list of biomorphisms goes on. A large portion of these were employed solely for their formal characteristics without their true understanding, denying the inherent systems logic that is associated in biological and geological natures, where each particular system is responding to processes and interactions at the microscopic levels; stress, strain, gravity, thermodynamic, and chemical reactions. It is not the case then that cancer cells at the microscopic level (for instance) should be scaled up to that of the human in an effort to solely mimic formal characteristics of a process occurring at several lesser magnitudes in scale.

It is often my provocation in competitions such as this to make an attempt at challenging the direction of the competition, and would therefore like to propose a representational technique for a speculative proposal; one of the anti-image, where there is no “final” image of the “thing” itself, but rather a diagrammatic representation of a collection of processes and events unfolding in space -where only the aggregation and accumulation of unique circumstances (flows of matter and energy input into a system) will lead to a new emergent amalgamation that will become the undefined project. We may speculate on a moment frozen in-time on what has coalesced as the project at a particular time, but the thing itself is not the final utopic construct–nor should it be represented as such-–a pristine image conveying sterility and stability. It is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but rather a process through which there is only the perpetual need to ‘progress’. Only pressures, processes, flows, bifurcations, obstacles (actions and reactions, causes and effects) within a diagrammatic framework should contribute leading to an unknown and unforeseeable set of formations. These will, in place of the sterility of the “photorealistic” will have importance in contributing to the discipline through this project. THESE aspects of the project will be where the design holds “stability” breaking free of a purely formalist project reaching to attain a one-image proposal through pseudo-biological “form” alone. Like OMA’s proposal for Downsview Park and Parc De La Villette, these projects do not propose THE park itself, such as in setting up a ‘picturesque’ scene, but realizes the morphological change that occurs in nature(s) over time, and in doing so sets the stage for the program and park to unfold. These techniques should exemplify morphological change, variation, affect and effect all unfolding within two-dimensional representational space, therefore challenging the very nature of the competition itself representationally. Architectural visionaries such as Neil Spiller, Perry Kulper and Leebeus Woods, prior to the onslaught of digital gluttony, are examples of those who have achieved such powerful work that far outweighs the intellectual depth conveyed in the previous winning entrants of the eVolo skyscraper competitions.