Aesthetics of emergence

Principles of design composition are commonly understood to pertain to geometrical systems for arranging parts in assembling a formal whole. Connection to socio-cultural 'meaning' and relevance arguably occurs primarily via the assumed divinity or universality of these systems. In the contemporary architectural world, where explicitly held beliefs in fundamental, geometrically defined principles or values have dissipated, guiding principles of composition appear to be obsolete. This seems particularly true in relation to work that highlights process - or change, responsiveness, interactivity and adaptability - since this implies that the composition remains in flux and unable to be grounded in the composition of form. While processually inflected architecture (referred to here as 'processual architecture'), has been an active field since at least the 1960s, it has been significa ntly developed since design experiments involving digital computation intensified in the 1990s. For this field of work, both highly celebrated and criticised as superficial or unethical, any connection to 'meaning' or value that might be offered by principles of composition would appear especially lost. This thesis reviews, counterpoises and reorients these assumptions, arguing a case for the value of processual architectural that has not been previously articulated. After the last 10 to 15 years of digital experimentation, it is clear that digital technology in itself is not the primary issue, but simply part of a complex equation. The thesis articulates this 'equation' through the model of emergence, which has been used in the field with increasing prominence in recent years. Through both practice-based research and theoretical development, a processually inflected theory of composition is proposed. This offers pathways through which the potential of processual architecture might be productively developed, aiming to open this field of work into a deeper engagement with pressing contemporary socio-political issues. The thesis demonstrates how the cultivation of particular modes of attention and engagement, found to hold an implicit but nevertheless amplified significance within processual architecture, make it possible to develop an embodied awareness pertaining to an 'ethico-aesthetic know-how'. This know-how is acquired and matured through attention to the affective dimensions that arise through design activity. The thesis highlight aspects of design process and products that are routinely suppressed in architectural discourse, generating new insights into the importance of affect for design process, design products and the relations between them. The ethical dimensions of such an approach become especially poignant through the explicit connection made between design activity and the practices of everyday life. Relationships between architecture and the social become re-energised, in a radically alternative manner to the social agendas of modernism or the more literary critiques of post-modernism. Through detailed discussions of the specific, local conditions with a series of design projects I have undertaken, I argue how and why close attention to the affective dimensions of design process offers new and productive ways to approach research through design practice. This offers a response to the calls for new 'post-critical' forms of research through empowering both sides of a previously held divide: theory and practice

ETHICO-AESTHETIC KNOW-HOW: THE ETHICAL DEPTHS OF PROCESSUAL ARCHITECTURE

This paper argues for an ethics embedded in the largely digitally oriented field of research I refer to as ‘processual architecture’, in terms of Francisco Varela’s notion of ethical expertise. Processual architecture has been a prominent field of architectural research whose depth of value and substance has eluded many. After the last 15 years or so of digital experimentation, it is clear that digital technology in itself is not the primary issue, but simply part of an equation. The ethical implications of this equation, I argue, can be found through the affinity between Varela’s ethical expertise and an idea of the art of emergence. Emergence, a construct that describes a contemporary version of the laws of nature, has been used with increasing prominence in architecture in recent years

Constructing living buildings: a review of relevant technologies for a novel application of biohybrid robotics

Biohybrid robotics takes an engineering approach to the expansion and exploitation of biological behaviours for application to automated tasks. Here, we identify the construction of living buildings and infrastructure as a high-potential application domain for biohybrid robotics, and review technological advances relevant to its future development. Construction, civil infrastructure maintenance and building occupancy in the last decades have comprised a major portion of economic production, energy consumption and carbon emissions. Integrating biological organisms into automated construction tasks and permanent building components therefore has high potential for impact. Live materials can provide several advantages over standard synthetic construction materials, including self-repair of damage, increase rather than degradation of structural performance over time, resilience to corrosive environments, support of biodiversity, and mitigation of urban heat islands. Here, we review relevant technologies, which are currently disparate. They span robotics, self-organizing systems, artificial life, construction automation, structural engineering, architecture, bioengineering, biomaterials, and molecular and cellular biology. In these disciplines, developments relevant to biohybrid construction and living buildings are in the early stages, and typically are not exchanged between disciplines. We, therefore, consider this review useful to the future development of biohybrid engineering for this highly interdisciplinary application.publishe

The Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia

The Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia. Each paper in the Proceedings has been double refereed by members of an independent panel of academic peers appointed by the Conference Committee. Papers were matched, where possible, to referees in the same field and with similar interests to the authors

Plastic super models: Aesthetics, architecture and the model of emergence

Modelling is at the core of what architects do, rendering the discipline especially fragile and sensitive to shifts in the nature of models and modelling. A digitally-based, explorative architectural milieu has been actively modelling in tune with a socio-cultural paradigm related to the concept of emergence, presenting numerous challenges to a range of assumptions about the activity of architectural design. This paper explores how this milieu has acted to unsettle the cool containments of architectural composure by bringing affective activity emphatically to the foreground

Fabulous creatures: Elegant swarms and parametric politics

What is it to form a collective? How do we collect ourselves into something irreducible to the sum of its individuals? What might the role of individual agency tell us about contemporary design agency? This paper thinks through these questions via the concept of 'creaturing'. Rather than referring to specific biological or imagined entities, here 'creaturing' refers to a sense of lived particularity; a way to think about the vitality of collectives and individual roles within them. The paper analyses a particular arena of contemporary design discourse in which 'creaturely' tendencies are explicitly embedded, and recent claims that this arena can be described as a new style called 'Parametricism'. It is argued that while 'Parametricism' implicitly promotes collectivity as a defining feature of design composition, its hegemonic refinement closes down its own potential for generating collective vitality. The paper points towards creaturely moments of mutation within the field in which a degree of messy unruliness is leaping into view, and suggests that these flickers of creaturely life could help guide our collectivity toward more lively prospects

Creaturely Collectives: parametricism and getting to the afterparty

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Housing granular plasticity

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Supervising emergence: Adapting ethics approval frameworks toward research by creative project

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All-over, over-all: biothing and emergent composition

In the last decade, the impact of the digital on form-finding in architecture has been conspicuous. Could working with computational algorithms as the primary generative material, however, have deeper, more far-reaching effects on the creative field? Here, Pia Ednie-Brown asserts that a new paradigm in composition is being articulated, as exemplified by the Invisibles installation, created by the New York-based practice biothing