Emergent architecture

It provides models and processes for the creation of artifical systems that are
designed to produce forms and complex behaviour, and perhaps even real intelligence.

---

Emergence and design group

The Emergent Design Group promotes research on new approaches to the design of
flexible organizational systems and structural morphology with a focus on advanced
materials and fabrication technology. EDG includes researchers and students in a number
of fields including Architecture, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Engineering,
and Media Arts and Sciences.

The main goal of EDG is to research structural morphology and new spatial models with a
focus on the emergent properties of material forms in architecture. A secondary goal is to
develop simulations, tools, prototype designs and building systems that test these principles
in real world applications. Projects break new ground by combining developments in modeling
theory, intelligent systems, organizational theory and the science of dynamics to transform
the way designers use a range of currently available technologies.

• GENR8: Generative Form Modeling

The goal was to provide architects with access to creative surface design by giving them influence
over generative processes. A generative process is the activity of iteratively executing some
encoding that creates and then modifies an artifact. In the generative process we chose, what
was most intriguing and of use to architects is a model of cellular growth interacting with an
environment.

The technical power beneath GENR8 is twofold: evolutionary search and HEMLS (Hemberg Extended
Map L-Systems). A HEMLS, the generative process, is interpreted by GENR8 to generate a surface.
GENR8 uses evolutionary search to discover its own HEMLS that adaptively evolve towards surfaces
with features the user has specified.

• Weaver

Explorations of industrial braiding and weaving led to the design of a grammar capable of describing
and generating woven strands. Weaver applies the pattern to a user-defined surface. The resulting
weaves can be complex and depend both on the description of the weave pattern and the topology
of the surface on which the weave is applied. Weaver is written in MEL and runs in Alias|Wavefront Maya.

• Agency

Agency is motivated by an interest in developing simulation tools to explore spatial paradigms associated
with so called "emergent organizations". The software is noteworthy for its use of evolutionary programming,
agent-based evaluation of fitness, and allowance for direct user interruption and reintegration of
phenotypically modified individuals. The investigative software is written in C++ as a plug-in to Alias|Wavefront Maya.

• Germz

As a computational design tool germZ is innovative in its application of Genetic Programming (GP) techniques
to the generation of three-dimensional form, and in its intelligent interaction with the user. In contrast to optimization
techniques, germZ supports the inherently nonlinear design process by always submitting multiple solutions for
review. The investigative software is written in C++ as a plug-in to Alias|Wavefront Studio.

http://web.mit.edu/arch/edg/#

---

Peter Testa

Peter Testa is Principal of the Los Angeles based firm TESTA established in partnership with Devyn Weiser in 1997. The office
specializes in architecture, system design, and sustainable engineering. Work includes Carbon Tower with ARUP New York and
Hillside Campus Master Plan for Art Center College of Design in collaboration with Álvaro Siza and Gehry Partners. Peter Testa
studied architecture in Europe and North America, and received a Master of Science in Architecture from MIT in 1984. He has
held academic and research positions at several design schools including Columbia University GSAP and Harvard University GSD.
Testa is Founding Director of the Emergent Design Group (EDG), a groundbreaking research program merging architecture, advanced
engineering, and artificial intelligence at MIT. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Design Arts Award of the National
Endowment for the Arts and the MIT Innovation in Teaching Award. He holds international patents for new building systems and
components with MIT and Herman Miller Inc. His work and writings are widely published in international journals in the fields of
architecture, art, artificial intelligence, design, and engineering, as well as major newspapers, anthologies, and other media.

• Carbon Tower

This prototype forty-story office building is built of carbon fiber and composite materials. The main structure is woven together,
rather than assembled from a series of distinct parts as in traditional construction methods, and has a double façade of transparent
and translucent membranes. The building’s structure consists of forty helical bands of carbon fiber, hundreds of feet long, winding in
both directions around the cylindrical volume. Instead of relying on a rigid internal core and a series of columns for stability, these thin
bands, each a foot wide and an inch thick, run continuously from the bottom to the top of the building and take the entire vertical
compressive load. A “virtual duct” runs the height of the internal core and supports displacement ventilation.

• http://www.peter-testa.com
• http://kcrw.org/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?show_code=de&air_date=4/19/05&tmplt_type=Show
• http://archrecord.construction.com/innovation/2_Features/0310carbonfiber.asp
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56477-2005Apr15.html

---

Frei Otto

Frei otto has been an architect for five decades, and his pioneering work is noted for construction innovations in many materials
and building forms. He discusses the devellopemtn of form finding techniques. This is one significant aspect of his interest in natural
systems, in the relation of experimental models to geometry and in iterative mathematics. He comments on the contribution of
irregularity to the strength in biological and architectual structures, and the proposal that to understand living nature is an important
task for the future.

• City in Antarctica

Feasibility study “City in the Antarctica“, 1971. Air-supported building as climatic shell over a city (together with E. Bubner, K. Tange, O. Arup)

http://freiotto.com

---

Michael Hensel & Ocean North

OCEAN NORTH is an experimental and multi-disciplinary design practice - based in London, Oslo and Helsinki
- that undertakes design projects, research and consultancy in urban design, architecture, product design and
cultural production. Tuuli Sotamaa, Kivi Sotamaa, Birger Sevaldson, Achim Menges and Michael Hensel lead the
practice. OCEAN NORTH collaborates with a wide spectrum of experts from relevant fields.

Architecture Recent projects include Phase 2 of the World Center for Human Concerns [USA, 2003-04], which commenced as a
study for a New World Trade Center commissioned by the Max Protetch Gallery in New York [USA, 2001-02]; Frozen
Voids, an ice structure designed for the Snowshow.

• World Center

The study for a World Center for Human Concerns for New York proposes a space for all peoples and cultures,
whether existing or emergent. The 430 meter tall volume of the World Center provokes a sensuous image of formation,
continuity and multiplicity. It remains intelligible whether one single object folds upon itself or divides, or whether
two objects are entwined in conflict or fusion. The object is and becomes both one and many at the same time,
suggesting the multiplicity and connectedness of human existence. As a memorial to the drama of 11 September
2001 and a statement against all acts of violence, the volume of the World Center inscribes within itself the volume
of Minoru Yamasaki's Twin Towers, which are visible as vague figures through the textured and folded skins of the
new building.

• Skyscraper

The study for the Landsc[r]aper Urban Ring Bridge across the river Rhine [Düsseldorf, Germany, 2000] is based on the
supposition that an inhabitable bridge on the required scale must seek to intensively engage the programmatic and
demographic strata of the urban matrix, in order to sustain differential inner-urban life. The scheme consists of three
elements. An outer urban ring links existing infrastructural routes in order to organize the traffic around and into the
city center. An intermediate ring links existing programmatic and infrastructural locations and induces pedestrian flow
via the deployment of public transportation along the perimeter of the expended city-center.

http://www.ocean-north.net/

---

-- Openloop. Jayne Potter - 21 Jun 2005