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Electrotexture, Esben Bala Skoube, Jens Pedersen
What if everyone could inform architecture and the growth of their city? What if architectural drawings could grow as processes in nature and everyday life?
Media Architectural Growth (MAG) was an installation exhibited at the Media Architecture Biennale in Aarhus. MAG speculates on future evolutionary planning strategies and presents potential planning scenarios that explore the relationship between control system, community and entropic environments – a topic highly relevant to people interested in the smart city or participatory technologies.
When computation was introduced to architecture some 60 years ago, its potential to inform new types of architectural practice was understood by Christopher Alexander, who developed a theoretical framework and Archigram who presented a series of new experimental topologies. However, one of the more artistic experiments was the installation, SEEK or Blocksworld. Displayed at the Jewish Museum in New York 1970. The installation was developed by a young Nicolas Negroponte who presented a study of robot building architecture in an entropic environment based on the movements of gerbil colony.
Much has happened since, but often the computational processes has been limited to a matter of geometrical control (BIM and parametric design) or regulation of smart lighting. MAG revisits Blockworld to explore radical and speculative design scenarios, that use contemporary media tools and techniques to push discussions of new types of architectures and public spaces.
Inviting users to help choose the preferred programs in the city, every design iteration realizes the most popular programs and visitors can follow the evolution of the installation by observing structure of the city captured and displayed on the wall. The installation presents an alternative use of media architecture tools to inform a button up evolutionary planning practice. We ask: What happens if we introduced planning strategies that allow environments to adapt every week instead of updating our city architecture every 30-50 years?
Evolutionary Design in Action
In the MAG installation the occupancy routines of everyday life in a gerbil colony is captured in a series of OCCUPANCY MAPs. The information is send to an agent based design system, which is inspired by natural agent based organization strategies observed in the evolution of slime-mould aggregation. The occupancy map will function as virtual pheromone tacks attacking the virtual agents, because each agent will leave trails of pheromone, others will follow and slowly new paths will emerge as an emergent bottom-up process. The system will slowly settle into optimal paths visible in the PHEROMONE MAPs.
