\u3cem\u3eWork\u3c/em\u3e 2005/2006

WORK is an annual publication of the Department of Architecture that documents student work in design studios and courses in the Master of Architecture and Post-Professional programs, as well as events, faculty news and student awards. It also includes abstracts of PhD dissertations defended that year. It provides an opportunity to explore the creative work of our students and is a permanent record of work in the Department

\u3cem\u3eWork\u3c/em\u3e 2006/2007

WORK is an annual publication of the Department of Architecture that documents student work in design studios and courses in the Master of Architecture and Post-Professional programs, as well as events, faculty news and student awards. It also includes abstracts of PhD dissertations defended that year. It provides an opportunity to explore the creative work of our students and is a permanent record of work in the Department

Exploring city spaces : an exploration into mapping practices and rule based design

This paper has been written in 3 sections. With some adjustments, the first section is largely the theory paper, the second my technology paper, and the third an exploration of my design. These three sections have been written as disparate parts. Ideas and themes are carried through the three papers, but they do not read as a coherent whole. This year has been a journey into the city of Cape Town; an exploration of its complexity, vibrant city spaces and everyday life. This is essentially what this paper is about, and is a theme that is explored in all three sections in different ways- with the third drawing and building on the first two. I started with ideas of Lefebvre and the work of CHORA as a methodology for exploring the 'everyday practices' in the city- and moved through this to an engagement with rule based design and algorithmic architecture. The design chapter loops back to the beginning of the paper, and draws from and is informed by both the initial research, a'1d rule- based methodology. All three of these sections have been exploratory processes engaging with this set of ideas around complexity within the city. I do not see them as providing an answer as to how to design or explore cities, but rather as an attempt to engage with these very real questions. They are a series of ideas that have enabled me to see parts of the 'hidden world' within Cape Town, and explore this through ideas of the unknown and unimaginable in architecture

Procedural Aesthetics and the Emergence of NeuroArt

Although Neuroart is related to the concept of Neuroaesthetics (S. Zeki), which is based on a scientific approach to aesthetic perception of art, and to the concepts of Neuroplastic arts (G. Novakovic) and Neuromedia (J. Scott) endorsing collaboration between artists and neuroscientists, it is at the same time distinct from them. We are using the term literally to refer to those artworks that are based on neural / brain waves signals and the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) or more specifically, EEG headsets in the production and display of artworks. We focus on EEG-based sound art, visual arts, interactive installations, and performance arts, and we identify Neuroart as a novel, emerging form or sub-genre of new media art. However, we do not limit Neuroart to human-generated artworks only. Given that Neuroart applies to detection or inspection of neural electric signals, we claim that the electric nature of those signals also applies to processes inherent in machine processing or neural computing such as Google Deep Dream and other generic platforms that lay the foundations for computer and/or AI generated art forms including database art, software art, visualization art, sonification art as well as those artworks that result in material artifacts presented in traditional exhibition format. We additionally claim that regardless whether the artworks of Neuroart are driven by a human or machine, they can have the same aesthetic discursive value, but within a context of a newly defined discipline of aesthetics that is Procedural Aesthetics. The Procedural Aesthetics (or the aesthetics of signal), can be understood as the discursiveness of the very process of signals (intensities) emission before they enter the sphere of conscious cognition. It is a pre-receptive and pre-semantics phenomenon. It deals with the processes otherwise not available to human perceptive apparatus, trying to reveal them, unmask them, by offering them to interpretation as cultural artifacts. And in order to do this, it relies heavily on technology and technical equipment allowing us the access to these ‘invisible’ processes through visualization, sonification, textualization, mapping and other forms of interpretable representations displayed as artworks

Testing terrain: exploring the computational design of natural systems in landscape architecture

While the use of computational design methods in landscape architecture is not uncommon, they are rarely used to develop performance-driven design strategies. Throughout this thesis, I argue that this shortfall stems from disciplinary differences in the design process and designed medium that are not reflected in common computational design tools. The scope for better reconciling these disjuncts is broad, but especially acute when employing design strategies that consider the performance of complex natural systems. Here, the overlap between disciplinary intent and computational capability is significant as natural systems have unique representational, scalar, and temporal complexities and their design forms a core concern of landscape architecture. Computation offers new approaches to managing these complexities, but also introduces new challenges. I investigate these using a design research methodology that foregrounds the tool development as a reflective practice that can span across specific design contexts and general disciplinary concepts. In discursive terms, I identify that the aims of computational design broadly align with those emphasised in contemporary landscape architectural theory: to pursue dynamism through generative systems. This seeming similarity masks a difference whereby the agency of computational design systems acts within the design process while the agency of landscapes systems acts within the world. Using the generative techniques of the former to help design the generative effects of the latter creates representations that posses a novel capacity for explicit precision and projection alongside a corresponding increase in implicit uncertainty. As a result, I suggest that traversing the solution space of these models requires a distinct design strategy that emphasises tendency and feedback over convergence. Framing the use of computational design methods in this manner highlights their value and purpose when modelling complex natural systems. In technical terms, I identify that current computational design platforms tend to employ geometry as the locus of design resolution and data propagation. In doing so they marginalise many informal or aformal landscape conditions and thus limit the scope of modelling. I explore alternatives through a process of tool-making that tests how to create interoperable procedures that each represent different aspects of landscape systems. In many cases, the encapsulation of computational procedures — as both machinic instructions and interface affordances — can enact existing landscape architectural theories of representation, ecology, and emergence. This form of instrumentality offers a distinct, valuable, and under-developed form of disciplinary praxis. However, as I highlight, its execution requires successfully negotiating between two modes of abstraction: the representation of computational procedures as software and the representation of landscape architectural design intent as computational procedures. The strategies I develop to align these two forms of representation help create more accessible and flexible computational methods for modelling complex natural systems

Digital architecture and difference: a theory of ethical transpositions towards nomadic embodiments in digital architecture

This thesis contributes to histories and theories of digital architecture of the past two decades, as it questions the narratives of its novelty. The main argument this thesis puts forward is that a plethora of methodologies, displacing the centrality of the architect from the architectural design process, has folded into the discipline in the process of its rewriting along digital protocols. These steer architecture onto a post-human path. However, while the redefinition of the practice unfolds, it does so epistemically only without redefining the new subject of architecture emerging from these processes, which therefore remains anchored to humanist-modern definitions. This unaccounted-for position, I argue, prevents novelty from emerging. Simultaneously, the thesis unfolds a creative approach – while drawing on nomadic, critical theory concepts, there surfaces an alternative genealogy already underpinning digital methodologies that enable a reconceptualization of novelty framed with difference to be articulated through nomadic digital embodiment. Regarding the first claim, I turn to the narratives as well as to the mechanisms of digital discourse emerging in two modes of production – mathematical and biological – in exploration of the ways perceptions of novelty are articulated: a) through close readings of its narratives as they consolidate into digital architectural theory (Carpo 2011; Lynn 2003, 2012; Terzidis 2006; Migayrou 2004, 2009); b) through an analysis of the two digital methodologies that support these narratives – parametric architecture and biodigital architecture. In parallel, this thesis draws on twentieth-century critical theory and twenty-firstcentury nomadic feminist theory to rethink two thematic topics: difference and subjectivity. Specifically, these are Gilles Deleuze’s non-essentialist, nonrepresentational philosophy of difference (1968, 1980, 1988) and Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic feminist reconceptualization of post-human, nonunitary subjectivity (2006, 2011, 2015). Nomadic feminist theory also informs my methodology. I draw on Rosi Braidotti’s cartographing and transposing (2006, 2011) because they engender a non-dualist approach to research itself that is dynamic and affirmative, insisting on grounding techniques – grounding in subject positions that are nevertheless post-human and nonunitary. This leads to a redefinition of novel digital practices with ethical ones

Design Transactions

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics

Design Transactions: Rethinking Information for a New Material Age

Design Transactions presents the outcome of new research to emerge from ‘Innochain’, a consortium of six leading European architectural and engineering-focused institutions and their industry partners. The book presents new advances in digital design tooling that challenge established building cultures and systems. It offers new sustainable and materially smart design solutions with a strong focus on changing the way the industry thinks, designs, and builds our physical environment. Divided into sections exploring communication, simulation and materialisation, Design Transactions explores digital and physical prototyping and testing that challenges the traditional linear construction methods of incremental refinement. This novel research investigates ‘the digital chain’ between phases as an opportunity for extended interdisciplinary design collaboration. The highly illustrated book features work from 15 early-stage researchers alongside chapters from world-leading industry collaborators and academics