cloud of reassembly

Archipelagic Networks: Architecture of Reassembly

UD Fall 2012

Instructor: Carla Leitão, carla@ubiroom.net

 

Introduction

This studio is part 2 of a series of 3 UD studios, through which sequence students will complete the development of a final project.

Archipelagic Networks: CLOUD of REASSEMBLY continues to develop the main theme and site explored in the Summer Semester in the studio “The 6th Borough”, including evolving concepts of Ambiance Approach, by proposing a conceptual framework of Cloud Architecture and a pro-active attitude of Reassembly.

The Cloud Architecture framework proposes a change in the mode in which materials, energy, structures and objects are connected in an architecture project, emphasizing micro-performance of distributed elements and their potential assemblies: to attend to this, students will engage ways of thinking of architecture as potentially made from highly sensitive and distributed particles in networks.

A ‘Reassembly’ approach will procure to further questions of merging city and nature – dealt with in the Summer semester – by emphasizing the engagement with the specific temporal aspects of the existing context/site mapping and its entities, enrolling these in the project as natures that all the while intangible (as suggested by T. Morton) or virtual, are evidently present and actual.
The studio will work in a reassembly mode by actively identifying, unpacking, unfolding existing entities and find new processes of linkage between them and new created natures.

CLOUD Architecture and Precedents

The Cloud figure can be found in Architecture culture in more and less apparent ways, having lent its transversal trait to different political and speculative agendas.

Banham’s discussion on Megastructures and the, albeit cross-cutting, totalizing regular spaces they may impose can be seen as both the natural mark of architecture’s ambition for ordering space, but as well can be the face for some of the most common shortcomings of virtual networks.
The project of Horizontal Skyscrapers by El Lissitzky, is used as a stylistic device that  – even when unanticipated – engages the organizational and navigational political space of the city.
Superstudio’s different projects, including the “Continuous Monument” or their “Fundamental Acts” series, speculates on structures which have a vast and either generic or specific type of pervasiveness, a macro-scalar movement which uses transversality as an operative connective tissue which renders certain cultural forms obsolete, while rendering new vacancies to take shape.
In Archigram’s works – such as “Instant City” or “Walking City” – moving, changeable, deployable, pluggable, rhythmic structures, seem to help emerge the metaphor of the cloud as well.

The fast pace of urban culture and increasing communication among different regions was for Archigram  somehow out of joint with a material practice that embodies concepts of maintenance and property, delayed from that of material, energy and information exchange between its operators.
Cedric Price’s investigations into distributed systems such as the Potteries Thinkbelt – where an educational program reuses an abandoned piece of infrastructure – are yet another early example.
Buckminster Fuller Energy Grids, Dimaxion and World Games were other aspects of Cloud Projects.
Other references to the ‘cloud’ made by architects or design theorists include Wolf Prix’s “Get Off My Cloud”, and its use of the word as illustration of an inclusive design process; as well, the famous Blur Building in Switzerland by Diller&Scofidio, where a literal cloud is produced as a device that fosters new navigational intermediaries, creating new visibility for often invisible virtual links, all the while setting a threshold configuration that interacts with multiple environmental conditions.

Currently, concepts of cloud communication and storage for digital media across networks, instantiate problems of information and intelligence/processing location and subsequent problems of property privacy and access. While with similar vocabulary, these often seem apart from problems of design: cloud structures in their generality seem to propose a future reduction on the need to house things in their proper places, and instead, create new systems of sharing and access that would render property and access, as we know it, obsolete. However, most of these systems of cloud storage (for data or software/operators) often use the imperfect metaphor, aiming to install central systems to which a number of nodes have access to.

In the Cloud Studio, the objective is to think of real clouds: highly concentrated humidity. A pervasiveness and redundancy of material, of distributed differentiated micro-autonomy, of packed performance and multiplicity – and in this way, create real full networking potential in an ‘object’.
This Cloud concept is rather inspired by the concept of the SPIME by Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling. In “Shaping Things”, Sterling talks of a near future where designed objects are aware of and broadcast their own history through embedded networking apparatus or ‘live’ pieces in their own constitution, cross-connecting to create future objects in continuous processes of assembly, disassembly and reassembly.
‘Live’ objects bring new dimensions to thinking the discipline of architecture, but also challenge some of the culture’s safer preconceptions: which scales can/will the discipline manage, and which processes can/will it influence?

Resilience continues to be a main figure or trope of architecture that has manifested  itself in the demand to create permanence, duration, memory, or the appearance of robustness in built spaces. It is also the property by which character is defined – that a particular structure is present as such: that there is a recognizable unity of some sort. The repeated uses of modules and deployment strategies relate back to the contingent use of resilience, to a demand for tested and proven outcomes.
The studio proposes an investigation of the ways in which the property of resilience can be construed, and how the dichotomy between a ‘static’ and a ‘stable’ structure can offer different aspects of this same operative concept. What dimensions of outcomes are left behind in the repeated use of models and in which places can the discipline insert itself to inquire and nurture them?

The CLOUD Studio looks into possible futures in the design of spaces which take serious advantage of ultra-locality and remote connection brought by advanced material sensitivity and/or connectivity, and distributed form or protocol – design possibilities in the constitution of new materials and media that Architects will use to design space and environments.

The Studio proposes that this paradigm shift creates pregnant new reflections to the discipline, in terms of the several new avenues by which terms like ‘concept’, ‘program’, ‘design’, ‘development’, ‘detail’ are understood to be able to be designed. What kind of generative representations, documents, controls and application points will the discipline and practice use?

Event, Pattern, Flow

Ultimately, all is flow. When sped up, flow often becomes event.
The patterns that emerge in cities are both specific and globally recognizable: patterns of protocols for material intersection, patterns of energy intensity and dissipation, patterns of human and cultural concentration and dispersion, patterns of sorting, triage and subdivision, patterns of clearing up, patterns of rebuilding.

The once evident traces of events slowly dissipate as restructuring of space happens to return to equalizing flow. Broken and separated entities become the only markers of the factor of speed and acceleration that turned flow into event.

Which design can produce a new set of creative flows – Flows that operate alongside but flickering with the speeds, scales and porosities of the existing flows and events?

Architecture of Reassembly

The CLOUD REASSEMBLY Thesis Section looks into future architecture modalities that can reassemble existing protocols while running alongside existing ones. Emphasizing and criticizing the paradigm of building as unity, and focusing on concepts of synthetic material character, assembly, micro-intelligence, local and remote sensitivity, and temporary characters of architectural space.

The Studio looks at the discipline within transitions from urban planning paradigms based on growth, to practice approaches that foster continuous transformation.
It aims to take Comprehensive Design to a whole new level, by researching, speculating, modeling, and evidencing the potential of highly sensitive relationships between material tectonics and assemblies, environmental qualities and programmatic conditions.

Speculation and Scenario Design

The Studio will work with several documents of Scenario Design and Planning from futurologists of different disciplines, including future-research consultancies, diverse scientists, media philosophy authors and also fiction writers and their sources.
Each project will evolve a timeline for their proposal projected deployment, that is particular to the proposal’s goals and objectives as a larger thesis. The scenario is the form by which ‘site’ is defined as a multi-faceted evolving context, and for the proposal to be integrated in a projected/proposed spacio-temporal reality.

 

Process/Methodology

The studio will explore potential informational, material and energetic futures for the new
archipelagic networks investigated in the previous semester, derive and iterate
morphologies that accomplish their new tectonics.
We will begin by analyzing the scales of the clusters and topologies formed by previous
studies, establishing criteria and potentials in those topologies.
Furthermore, we will develop studies that explore regimes of connectivity and selective
disconnection present in those archipelagic scales.

Projects will develop though the following studies:

– On the one hand, we will explore abstract modalities of exploring the topologies
capacities to absorb and deploy new behaviors as a network, studying aspects such as
potential intrinsic density of connections and diversity, scope and range of connectivity.
We will work with readings that assess precedent applications as well as theories of
different kinds of network structures. Among other things we will be looking into
precedent networks in history, and biology, as well as in media theory and materialist
based readings relating both.

– On the other hand, we will inquire upon different scalar and quality criteria to evaluate
performance of informational, energetic and material scenarios for the range of
connectivities the networks could mediate and redeploy.

The goal of the studio is to develop a series of synthetic programmatic and
morphological maps/landscapes, that have clear directions and studies on the larger
and smaller scale regions they produce.
These will be tested as dynamic scenarios, for their capacity to produce time-based
performances, such as cultural cycles or seasons across their body(ies) and in
relationship to the urban bodies they are at once a counterpoint and in continuity with –
the dense center and broader urban fabric around/within the pull of NYC.