New materials and fabrication methods have historically led to radical changes in architectural design. They have indeed been the primary drivers in its evolution. The introduction of new methods and materials is usually followed by phases of intense experimentation, during which architects explore the new potentials – often without preconceptions – and try to determine how these can best be applied.

On both the computational design and the fabrication side, parallel concepts have evolved based on the idea of particle elements or voxels. Nearly endless abstract geometrical elements can now be computationally composed to form the architecture of entire buildings. Countless particles of material can now be solidi!ed by 3D printers into massive building components. Numerical material and physical material are merging into one. The !eld of architectural synthesis is open.

The potential implications for architectural design are extraordinary. First, as there is potentially a WYSIWYG correspondence between design and fabrication, it is no longer necessary to produce two-dimensional plans, details or construction drawings. Design never enters a 2D space, nor does it need to originate there. Second, there can be unlimited dierentiation within and element, and unlimited inidividuality between elements. Uniformization is not imperative as there are little economies of scale to be gained. Finally, there is no longer a cost for complexity – neither in terms of time nor in terms of material.

In this module students explored these new technologies through the design of a villa situated at the Blatterwiese at Zürichhorn. Selected design excerpts will be printed at a 1:1 scale. Final presentations of each design are presented below.

Maria Smigielska: How to achieve spatial qualities from flat plans ?

Joel Letkemann: Asterion III: The Lake House

Jessica In: The Four Dimensional Nightmare
An ill-tempered Architecture.
In the J.G. Ballard short story The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, architecture is now PsychoTropic, capable of responding to the moods and reactions of its inhabitants. The main character moves into a PT house previously inhabited by a film star who murders her architect husband. Having absorbed the echoes of previous tenants, the house begins to turn against its new owners, who must deal with the consequences of an emotional house.
If a building is capable of emotion, and of physically expressing this emotion, what kind of characteristics would it exhibit? Do the different parts of the building exhibit different emotions? Is a column melancholy? Can a slab be violent? Is there such thing as a happy staircase? How can such emotions be described through architectural form, and in turn, evoke response from inhabitants?

Achilleas Xydis:

Demetris Shammas: VI1:1A  
Villa 1:1 is an experiment on the creation of spatial artifacts by the use of sound.
Abstract elements are designed to be momentarily substantiated by the resonance.
Villa 1:1 articulates the notion of a villa, an any villa, functionally non-predetermined and implicitly changing; a four-dimensional schema were one after the other, rooms appear through nothingness and disintegrate into nothingness. The focus is not the production of a rigid architectural piece, but rather ‘the unfinished’, an act that envisages an architecture in its primordial stage. Sedated, dreamy, crude but surprisingly sensual, the villa is a place of all possibilities, an unsettled shape which expresses a moment yet alludes to all other possible moments. Complex and heterogeneous but at the same time empty, a space of nothingness where everything is.

Nicholas Miranda: Untitled

David Schildberger: body and cliché  

Lecture

06.05.13 // 16:00 – 17:00

Chair for CAAD, HPZ Floor F

Lukáš Kurilla is currently a teaching assistant in Studio Flo|w [link http://www.studioflorian.com/en, http://caad.kurilluk.net/ in Prague.

In his work and research he focuses on synergy  between human intuition and computing calculation and development of decision supporting software tools aimed to help architects optimize structural design especially in the concept design phase.  Cooperation with an artist Federico  Díaz [link: http://www.fediaz.com/  on projects:

ULTRA – CNC digital fabricated installation for PS1 in Miami (2008), an experimental  project LacrimAu and thermo-displays Pulsar, exhibited in Expo Shanghai (2010). At the conference Rob|Arch 2012 in Vienna he presented optimization of a robotic fabricated structure Geometric Death Frequenci -141.

CAAD lecture series: Philip Beesley

Radiant Soil

02.05.2013 17:00 HPZ F

Might  architecture be envisioned as a kind of radiant, diffusive soil? New projects from the Hylozoic Series explore fertile, diffusive systems. The radically open qualities of this new kind of aerial soil might seem opposite to the kinds of disciplined forms that minimize waste and serve sustainable architecture. Equations  that seek maximum territory and minimum exposing faces might say that waste reduction demands the closure of boundaries and the avoidance of exposure. Yet the deeply fissured forms of snowflakes and flowers demonstrate effective energy exchanges that are based on maximum interaction with their surroundings.  If buildings were designed for diffusion and interwoven relationships, perhaps forms akin to forests and soils might result.

Philip Beesley will present recent projects from the Hylozoic Series with underlying concepts and next stages of development in the work. Pursuing  a renewed, diffusive form-language for architecture, several different kinds of active liquid cells are integrated within masses of suspended glass flasks within current building assemblies in development. These include protocells, organic power cells, reticulated storage manifolds and scent-lures.  Glass vessels house self-generating protocells, offering osmotic felt-like skins,  and blooming precipitates.  Other liquid cells have forms akin to natural glands. Organic power cells provide weak amounts of current in the form of pulses that behave like unconscious reflexes within a human nervous system.

Philip Beesley MRAIC OAA RCA (Professor School of Architecture, University of Waterloo; Director Integrated Group for Visualization, Design and Manufacturing, Director Riverside Architectural Press) is a practicing architect developing responsive kinetic architectural environments that approach near-living functions. He is cited as a pioneer in the rapidly expanding technology of responsive architecture with wide press including WIRED, TEDx, Discovery Channel features. He has authored and edited eight books, three international proceedings and a number of catalogues, and appears on the cover of Artificial Life (MIT), LEONARDO and AD journals. Current projects are in London, Paris, Edmonton and Hangzhou. He was selected to represent Canada for the 2010 Venice Biennale for Architecture and the 2012 Biennale of Sydney. A series of dresses with Iris Van Herpen were recently launched at Paris Fashion Week. Distinctions include Prix de Rome in Architecture (Canada), VIDA 11.0, FEIDAD, RAIC Allied Arts, ACADIA Emerging Digital Practice, Dora Mavor Moore awards. He is chair for the ACADIA 2013 Adaptive Architecture international conference.

CAAD lecture series: Jose Sanchez

Gamescapes

06.05.2013 17:00 HPZ F

In this lecture, Jose Sanchez will present the research on game mechanics in the context of architectural design. His research explores the definition generative protocols where relations establish a rigorous understanding of architectural variables yet allowing for an intuitive gameplay or ‘searchspace’ of different configurations. His cluster research at UCL Graduate Architectural Design course uses a theoretical framework of Object Oriented Ontology, looking at authors like Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton, in the speculation of a flat ontological status between humans and objects, both physical and conceptual. The gamescapes agenda has been initiated after the completion of the Bloom project for the London Olympics were game mechanics were utilized to speculate on open ended tectonics.

Jose Sanchez is an Architect / Programmer / Game Designer based in London. He is partner at Bloom Games, start-up built upon the BLOOM project, winner of the WONDER SERIES hosted by the City of London for the London 2012 Olympics. He is the director of the Plethora Project (www.plethora-project.com), a research and learning project investing in the future of on-line open-source knowledge. The project has over 100 videos and an open-source library of code that has been visited by over 400.000 people since it was founded in 2011. His background in computational design and digital manufacturing is linked to Biothing with Alisa Andrasek, where he was one of the principal designers in numerous projects and exhibitions since 2009. Today, he is a course studio Master at the Master in Architectural Design at the Bartlett school of architecture, UCL in London. His studio ‘Gamescapes’, explores generative interfaces in the form of video games, speculating in modes of intelligence augmentation, combinatorics and open systems as a design medium.

Module 3:  Theory + Information 

Participants have been developing individual responses to the workshops held over the last three weeks, and the conclusion of Module 3 saw them presented today. See below for final video presentations.

Tihomir Janjusevic:  

Achilleas Xydis:  

David Schildberger:

Joel Letkemann:

Akihito Tanigaito:

Demetris Shammas:  PartheNone or: How to leave your myth in Greece 
The quest for prespecific knowledge shifts from the attempt to invert Alice in Wonderland to a tale of ruins; ruins of the most beautiful monument of Greece or a monument of the most beautiful ruins of Greece. Reassembling ‘history’ as a dual schema of republic and aristocracy succeeding one another, we follow a building’s path from a vibrant yet unrepresentable birth to a romantic crucifixion, watching as the oikos of Virgin Athena advances towards an image.

Nicolás Miranda – Garden/Nature:

Jessica In : Face Off (a peek under the masks and faces of portraiture through the lens of Vilem Flusser)
Flusser’s understanding of history as breaks from linear writing to and from images is reinterpreted as switching between different views of one’s orientation to the world. Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet – what can the history of portraiture reveal about the values and desires of its subjects, and how they orient themselves in and to the world? Contains audio and video samples by Quayola, speech samples from Flusser’s lecture “We Shall Survive in the Memory of Others”, speech samples from Art Through Time: A Global View, Portraits.

M4 Guest Lectures

Tomasz Jaskiewicz and Stefan Dulman, 25th February 2013
More info here about our guest presenters here:  http://www.mas.caad.arch.ethz.ch/blog/caad-lecture-series-35-tomasz-jaskiewicz-stefan-dulman/

Weixin Huang, 18th February 2013
More info here about our guest presenters here:  http://www.mas.caad.arch.ethz.ch/blog/caad-lecture-series-weixin-huang-lei-yu/

Lei Yu, 18th February 2013
More info here about our guest presenters here:  http://www.mas.caad.arch.ethz.ch/blog/caad-lecture-series-weixin-huang-lei-yu/

CAAD lecture series: Mark Offermann

Staging ConCrete – a novel ComPound and itS PoSSibilitieS

12.03.2013 17:00 HPZ F

Staging ConCrete – a novel ComPound and itS PoSSibilitieS

Concrete is trendy! Through intensive scientific work, the formerly simple construction material has become a high-performance composite, offering numerous new possibilities for appliance. Despite the functional advantages, concrete still faces strong resentments throughout the society. To change the bad image of the material, collaborations between the cement industry, scientific research institutions and designers are neccessary.

Part 1: Characteristics of a novel compound

For the last 3 years, the design studio PAULSBERG has been exploiting the possibilities of carbon- fibre-reinforced concrete. The first part of the lecture will show the background of the material, its characteristics and possibilities as well as some examples for appliance.

Part 2: Material Visualisation

Presenting three different design cases, the secondpart of the lecture will show, how a creative approach to a new material, can not just help to reach a greater audience but in many cases can be the first step to understanding the characteristics of the material.

Mark Offermann is one of three managing partners at the design studio PAULSBERG. For the last 3 years, the Dresden-based studio has been exploiting the possibilities of carbon- fibre- reinforced concrete. Taking a narrative rather than technical approach, the trio has been internationally recognized for their furniture and interior design projects, dealing with the novel material. After successfully finishing his studies in Architecture and Scenography, Mark Offermann has worked for Architecture offices in Dresden and Leipzig.

CAAD lecture series: Delia Dumitrescu

Relational Textiles

13.03.2013 17:00 HPZ F

The relationship between technology and the expression of form have always been interconnected in the architectural design process; associating the art of envisioning spaces with the craft of materializing them. Recently in terms of surface fabrication, computational tools of representation and material fabrication opened for architectural design new possibilities to explore novel spatial expressions. Surface design processes in architecture start to borrow from the logic of representation of different non-hierarchical structures, e.g., biological systems or textile construction techniques. Relating to that, the present fascination of textiles in architectural design relies on this specific way of building surface design as non-hierarchical form, and by that, allowing the designer to play with the depth of the surface design at micro and macro levels.

Exploring different relations between digital and physical through textiles expressions, this research reassess static principles of form–marking the turn from static to relational principles. Thus, the intention is to describe how the character of the textiles and computation as design material redefines the notion of space trough surface aesthetics merging the digital to the physical, and how spatiality can be questioned through textile and interaction aesthetics. Using practice-based research methodology, this research opens and explores this design space by relating theory and practice; it questions and reframes fundamental concepts of expression and scale in architecture by proposing methods for surface design, and a specific language to describe textile architectural aesthetics.

Delia Dumitrescu lectures BA students in textile design at the Swedish School of Textiles. She holds a degree in architectural design from the University of Architecture and Urbanism Ion Mincu, Bucharest and a MA in Textile Design at the Swedish School of Textiles, Borås. She is currently completing her PhD at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås. Her research develops theoretical knowledge through design on Smart Textiles as materials for architecture. Her work focuses on developing design methods for interactive textile surfaces using knitted constructions. Her projects have been exhibited at the Stockholm Furniture Fair, Salone Satellite, Milan, Responsive by Material Sense, Berlin, Hannover and Avantex, Frankfurt, Keller Center, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Cambridge.

CAAD lecture series: Tomasz Jaskiewicz + Stefan Dulman, TU Delft

Realizing Complex Interactive Architecture

25.02.2013 17:00 HPZ F

Part I – Dr. Tomasz Jaskiewicz (Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft)
The concept of interactive architecture (iA) stems from the premise that buildings and built environments can be formed and trans-formed in continuous and direct response to needs and activities of their inhabitants, while also, in turn, reciprocally influencing future needs and activities. The past decade has seen a revival of iA ideas, made possible with latest technological advancements and following current social trends. Among those, projects investigated at the TU Delft’s Hyperbody chair investigate new experiences and spatial qualities that iA can deliver, define the new role of an architect in iA and verify the societal need for interactive buildings. Yet despite all these explorations, to date all cases of interactive architecture are just experimental and highly constrained in scale and scope. How do we move from these limited, small-scale projects to realising truly interactive buildings, public spaces and cities?

Part II – Dr. Stefan Dulman (Faculty of Computer Science, TU Delft)
Large-scale installations containing embedded systems (sensors, actuators, displays, etc.) become difficult to design and manage once the number of devices increases over, say, a few hundreds. The traditional approach of using a central computer to coordinate such a network, if feasible at all, has a number of disadvantages such as its prohibitive high price. A different design approach is to remove the central computer completely from the solution and focus on a distributed systems approach. A number of cheap computing elements are deployed in the system and the desired network behavior will be created from their interaction. In this lecture, we will focus on the concept of emergent behavior occurring in large networks. We will show how it can be used as a programming primitive and briefly introduce a few examples.

Dr. Stefan Dulman received the BS and MS degrees from “Gh.Asachi” Technical University, Iasi, Romania in 2001 and respectively in 2002. He was awarded the PhD degree for the thesis entitled “Data-centric architecture for wireless sensor networks” at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, in 2005. He started his research career by focusing on the area of wireless sensor networks. Some of his research results being integrated in the products of the Ambient Systems BV, a Dutch SME specialized in providing wireless solutions for the transport and logistics scenarios, where he acted as founding member and senior researcher between 2004-2010. Between 2009-2013 he held the Assistant Professor position at the Delft University of Technology, Embedded Software Chair. His current research interests include self-adaptive aspects of large-scale embedded systems (wireless sensor networks, robotic swarms, mobile ad-hoc networks), spatial computing, interactive distributed systems. He pays a particular interest to the real-world applicability of his research, especially in the field of interactive architecture. He was involved in several research projects, both at European level (Eyes, Wisebed, Demanes) and Dutch national level (Free, LoCare). He has co-authored more than 50 research papers in peer-reviewed publications.

His full CV can be found here: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stefandulman

Dr. Tomasz Jaśkiewicz is an architect, urban designer, academic researcher and educator. After finishing his undergraduate studies in Architecture and Urban Planning at TU Gdansk in Poland, he joined the Hyperbody chair at the faculty of Architecture, TU Delft in the Netherlands. There, in 2005, he obtained his Master of Science degree as an Architect, with a thesis on a real-time participatory urban planning toolkit “Paracity”. Afterwards he continued this work as a leading researcher on a series of Protospace Demo projects, investigating novel applications of computational techniques and interfaces to participatory and collaborative architectural and urban design. In following years he joined the architecture firm ONL [Oosterhuis_Lénárd] where he worked as architect and project manager, bringing much of his earlier studies to practice. In 2007 he has started his PhD research at TU Delft, in which, supervised by prof. Kas Oosterhuis, he developed an integrated design framework for development of evolving interactive architectural ecosystems. Next to his research, he also works as an academic teacher, among others having initiated and coordinated the interdisciplinary undergraduate minor program “Interactive Environments”. Since 2011 he has been the manager of TU Delft’s Architecture design laboratory “protoSPACE”, an innovative prototyping facility and think-tank where numerous research, commercial and educational projects on out-of-the-box applications of technology to architectural design are being executed. In all his projects, Tomasz transgresses the boundaries between conventionally established disciplines and practices. He explores new paths leading towards creation of architecture approached as a complex adaptive system. In this way, he aspires to produce artificial spatial ecologies operating in a proactive symbiosis with their human inhabitants and with the natural environment.

His full CV can be found here: http://www.jaskiewicz.net/cv

CAAD lecture series: Weixin Huang + Lei Yu, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, Beijing

Digital Stimulation through Design : Generative design and interactive installation exploration in architectural education

18.02.2013 17:00 HPZ F

Weixin Huang lectures at the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing.
He is also an organizational officer for CAADRIA.

Lei Yu graduated from the Harvard GSD and is currently a doctoral candidate at Tsinghua University. He is also a Principal of ASW.