Here’s a great project that came out of the Adapative Architecture and Computation programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture. ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ by Marilena Skavara explores the functional possibilities and performative characteristics of cellular automata (CA). In addition to the unique emergent behaviour of CA, a neural network enables a further computational layer to evolve CA behaviour to the context of its surrounding environment.

Building upon the early work of Conway’s ‘Game of life’ and Stephen Wolfram’s extensive research on the wider implementation of CA, ‘Adaptive Fa[ca]de’ becomes a living adapting skin, constantly training itself from the history of its own errors and achievements. For a more detailed description of the project, read Marilena’s article for Vague Terrain.

Joshua Noble’s new issue of Vague Terrain is definately worth a look. He described this issue as “an exploration of space, functionality in space, and the relationship of the body to the systems around it. All technologies reshape the body and the space around the body, from the bow and arrow to the steam engine to the telephone. It may be that we are beginning to truly see how computing and ubiquitous devices will once again reshape our bodies and our conceptions of ourselves in space. It is with this emphasis that we present a selection of thinkers, artists, architects, and designers and examine and explore how their ideas will shape art, aesthetics, design, living spaces, and social structures and how those ideas will ultimately be shaped by their users and their spaces.”

Articles have been written by Golan Levin, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Marilena Skavara, Mark Shepard, Pierre Proske and Joshua himself.

Reflexive Architecture Machines envisions architecture that is self-organizing, capable of transforming itself in response to changes in its environment or use. It re-imagines how we shape and assemble conventional materials, like rubber, plastic, and wood through a combination of material and computational processes to develop more complex relations between parts and wholes. This fundamentally challenges the static nature of conventional building materials and sensitizes them to the ephemeral and dynamic qualities of environmental conditions like heat, moisture, air chemistry and gravity. This exhibition in the University of Buffalo Art Gallery presents faculty and student research in responsive materials conducted at the Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning. It displays the products of the design lab, presented through drawings, models, tools, material studies and working prototypes that demonstrate the process by which projects are conceived, researched, and developed.

Projects on view include Allotropic Systems designed by Nicholas Bruscia, which uses flexible rubber molds to produce self-similar plastic casts. By reusing the same mold to produce one plastic sibling after another both plastic’s and rubber’s mutability is exploited to yield a considerable amount of formal variety.

Matthew T. Hume’s Warped offers experiments in plywood construction featuring a set of walls and arches composed from mechanically joined wood plys that change their shape in response to atmospheric moisture by twisting and bending between open and closed conditions. Omar Khan’s Gravity Screens and Open Columns explore the possibilities offered by elastomers for developing an organically kinetic architecture. They use the unique quality of this material to build collapsible and expandable structures that move similar to plants and respond to information gathered by electronic sensors. Omar Khan will also be talking at the Bartlett School of Architecture this coming Wednesday Evening. The lecture is free and open to the public. Details 6.30pm Wednesday 24 February 2010. Darwin Lecture Theatre, Darwin Building, Gower Street, London, WC1

Coming up in London soon, the one-day conference explores new materials for architectural practice in the 21st century. International architects and scientists will explore the decision-making properties of matter and how this may be applied to create increasingly life-like buildings.

Organised by The Bartlett’s Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research (AVATAR) group, the conference aims to bring together architects and scientists who are working with new technologies that are capable of self-assembly and organization. Such technologies may form the basis for architecture generated by unconventional computing techniques which range from the actions of protocells, (entirely synthetic DNA-less agents), slime moulds (simple organisms with very complex behaviours), crystalline computing (using the organizing properties of molecules) and algae (that can be engineered to respond to environments in new ways). Neil Spiller founded the AVATAR Group in 2004, whose interdisciplinary research agenda explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain and considers the impact of advanced technology on architectural design, engaging with cybernetics, aesthetics, and philosophy to develop new ways of manipulating the built environment.

Speakers:

Neil Spiller (University College London)
Rachel Armstrong (University College London)
Evan Douglis (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Paul Preissner (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Lisa Iwamoto (University of California, Berkeley)
Philip Beesley (University of Waterloo)
Nic Clear (University College London)
Martin Hanczyc (University of Southern Denmark)
Ben de Lacy Costello (University of West England
Simon Park (University of Surrey)
Lee Cronin (University of Glasgow)

more information here

Here a book I’ve really been meaning to post about for a long time. Published by PA Press, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp have put together as they call it “a processes-oriented guide to creating dynamic spaces and objects capable of performing a range of pragmatic and humanistic functions. These complex physical interactions are made possible by the creative fusion of embedded computation (intelligence) with a physical, tangible counterpart (kinetics). A uniquely twenty-first century toolbox and skill set-virtual and physical modeling, sensor technology, CNC fabrication, prototyping, and robotics-necessitates collaboration across many diverse scientific and art-based communities. “

It contains a huge number of artists, architects and designers all working in and around this field that I have found so fascinating over the past couple of years. Its more than just a coffee table book, I think they’ve done an excellent job finding themes that run through the discipline and taken on some of the key challenges including asking “Interaction” can be understood to be in a spatial context. Its definitely worth picking up and will appeal to architects, artists and designers alike.

Rachel Armstrong teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she is advocating a new approach to architecture – one that sees buildings becoming living things. One of the best things about working at the Bartlett are some of the extraordinary people that you spend time with day to day and while I often get lost in the science when Rachel explains her goals for a Living Architecture, I adore the passion and vision of a truly interactive architecture capable of continual conversation with it built and natural environment.

Key to Armstrong’s work are protocells – little cells of fat that can be sprayed on a building, creating a sort of frosting. These are designed to trap carbon dioxide and solidify it, turning it into solid pearls of calcium carbonate or biolime or mock rock. This coating will protect the building and even mend cracks. These protocells could even be used to stop Venice sinking, says Armstrong. Her plan is that the cells would be programmed to solidify when they get to the bottom of the lagoon, shoring up the foundations of the buildings above and thereby supporting the sinking structures. Find out more at TED and Rachel’s own website.

Created by architect Giselbrecht + Partner ZT GmbH this amazing project is called “Dynamic Facade” better known as the Kiefer Technic Showroom in Bad Gleichenberg, Austria.

One for those lucky enough to enjoy the Australian summer whilst we’re freezing up here in London- Olafur Eliasson’s Take Your Time exhibition is now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Not that we Londoners have anything to complain about really, as we got his Weather Project back in 2003, and judging by the number of people that chose to lie on the floor underneath it, we liked it. It looks like i’ll be in Sydney myself for a couple of days in March, and Take Your Time @ MCA is number 1 on my list of things to check out whilst i’m there.

One-way colour tunnel, 2007

Take Your Time is the first large-scale exhibition of works by this Danish-Icelandic artist to be presented in Australia. Raised partly in Iceland, Eliasson’s practice is informed by that country’s landscape and spectacular weather. He draws upon elements such as light, water, ice, fog, arctic moss and lava rock to create works that shift viewer perception and sense of place. From light-filled environments to walk-in kaleidoscopes, Eliasson’s unique, experiential works explore the intersection between nature and science, and the boundary between the organic and the artificial.

Notion Motion, 2005

Take Your Time opened earlier this month and will go through until April 11, 2010. It’s almost impossible to capture the beauty of the works in photographs, which leaves one choice – go and check it out. Stay tuned for more words from me once i’ve made it over there myself!

Olafur Eliasson

MCA Website

Sound is an integral part of the way we understand the space surrounding us. Size, quality, timbre, texture and the atmosphere of a space can all be inferred by the way in which we experience sound. Based on ideas from the Suffolk island of Orford Ness, Ric Lipson’s acoustic theatre ‘Hear Here” has been developed over a preoccupation with the acoustic qualities of circular spaces and ambient sonic landscapes. His work features in ‘Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands‘.

Ric Lipson’s Hear Here concerns itself with sound and the body aiming to generate a physical construct that, while taking physics, music and architecture into account, sets out to explore how space can be understood through sound. If architecture is the manipulation of space, then the built form is a way of capturing the ambient. At the core of this question is the way space is experienced as a function of the sounds found both within and around the space, and the sounds that result from occupancy of the space.

The building is the final movement in the score of this experiential journey concerning itself with sound and the body. By giving concepts physical form, the experience can be explored. It is a tourable, demountable structure. By exploring concepts of resonance, reflection, absorption, forced and natural, the work creates a ‘sonic geography’ framed within a physical construct that invites you to explore, listen, improvise and experience.

Comprising a monocoque, aluminium, open cone wrapped within a closed, tensioned, plywood structure, the two spaces act in combination to echo the form of the ear. The outer ear is the space in-between the wooden and aluminium skin, and it has a soft acoustic. Sounds reflect around the walls in a whispering gallery-type nature. The audience follow the sounds around the dark outer corridor and are ‘cleansed’ of what John Cage would describe as the “chaos of the everyday sounds”. The journey around the structure leads the audience into the inner drum. The aluminium cone is open to the world. It is bright and metallic, both in form and acoustic.

This ‘Acoustic Theatre’ combines the world of manufacture, with the ephemeral nature of the ambient. The structure becomes a frame for the sound to exist. The audience are invited to enter and listen. The inner metal skin acts as an instrument, listening to the outer world and playing it back through a set of speakers. These sounds reflect and reverberate around the space. Essentially the pavilion is an ear capturing sounds from its immediate environment. Its geometries can intensify, resonate and distort these found sounds and act as a passive instrument, playing sounds of the city based on the occupier’s position within the structure.

The final piece in the Emergence Exhibition is “Sniff” by Karolina Sobecka and Jim George. Sniff is an interactive projection: an animated dog follows passers-by, discerns their behavior as friendly or aggressive, tries to engage them and forms a relationship with them based on the history of the interaction. As the viewer walks by the projection, their movements and gestures are tracked by a computer vision system. Sniff is an exploration of the moment of engagement.

It partly grew out of interest in philosophical discussion about the mind and mind theory, particularly in what’s termed the “commonplace” understanding of mental states and inferring of agency. Our automatic interpretation of behavior as social interaction is especially emblematic in a non-linguistic engagement with the ‘other’, which in case of Sniff produces a hybrid space of virtual and real emotions, social guess-work and mind modeling. Sniff is an attempt to trigger an intense, playful and insightful level of engagement at which we solve the “other minds” problem in everyday life. Sniff is inserted into our physical reality and follows its rules.