Living Architecture : 12 Bits on Buildings

Living Architecture : 12 Bits on Buildings Alex Haw, Otto Ng, NashidNabian, Carlo Ratti

BUILDING LIFE

Victorian technological innovations in steel, glass and concrete radically revolutionised building structures. Subsequent modernist engineering revolutionised their atmospheres. Our Digital Age promises to entirely overshadow even these mighty revolutions in its widespread transformation of the entire sphere of architecture, transforming every process and component of the industry and discipline, from inception to inhabitation.

Architecture has always sought to mimic life. Throughout history, inflection of form and motifs of growth and nature persistently press through the surface of our edifices to suggest the animation of built space – as if architecture was a partner organism, an active participant in our broader ecology. A vast history of architectural explorations - from the Gothic to the Baroque, Expressionism to Deconstructivism, Modernisme to “Parametricism"- have sought to animate dead form with the illusion of life, typically through appeal to growing or flowing form, which inevitably finishes fixed and frozen.

This paper argues that exactly 100 years after the perils of our last Ice Age (with Scott’s expedition down South and the Titanic up North both floundering in 1912), the ice is rapidly thawing; that our digital age is enabling our built environment to at last spring to real – not just metaphorical – life, performatively entwining with humanity, climate and nature as our very first form of actual Living Architecture.

Its narrative thread commences with the birth of architecture and the revolution of its design tools, and proceeds through fabrication and construction to occupancy, suggesting the latter as an ongoing creative act that, in concert with inhabitable computation, enables and promotes a new life force in architecture.

THE ORGANS OF OUR INFORMATION AGE

If the Victorian age refined the architectural systems of digestion and excretion and Modernism revolutionised our architectural respiration, our Digital Age has accelerated development of the entirety of all our proto-biological systems – particularly the all-controlling central nervous system. Building Management Systems – the neural networks of built space – are the sentient homeostatic brains that manage the rest of the body of our buildings.

The “orders” of architecture are on the move, migrating from the clip-on columns of ornamental facades that long ceased to be structural to a broader structural role - as the core operating mechanisms that categorise, control, and completely “order” the modern building. If computers were once the size of buildings, buildings are now becoming computers – active, intelligent systems laced with programming and processors, sensors and actuators, constantly assessing and recalibrating our environments, engaged in dialogue with a range of forces far wider than the age-old nemesis of mere gravity.

Like the way their drawings always have, buildings increasingly exhibit that least likely sign of life – reproduction itself. As ever more physical materials require a virtual journey. digitally tagged and managed, shaped and fabricated, and as manufacturing shifts from industrialised seclusion to localised sites of production and even the home itself, nascent self-replicating technologies like Rep-Rap point the way towards a future where buildings will, self-replicate all their parts and giving birth to the next generation of their own built matter. Beyond the common techniques of cutting and printing, milling and sintering, experiments in biological building materials suggest the possibility to organically grow fibres of living buildings.

THE CODE OF CONSTRUCTION

The theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman observed that the source of life was code (the microcode of DNA) – and so it is with the life of buildings. Code is to architecture like the atom to matter – its base unit; almost everything in contemporary architecture is ultimately code. Code, invisibly and inaccessibly, drove the software that ushered in the first digital revolution of architectural production and the proliferation of CAD in the ‘90s; now it drives almost everything from the manufacture of materials to the design of their composition, the production of spaces to the management of their occupancy.

Code unifies all the stages of architecture - the core constituent of architectural design, construction and occupation, and the source of all built life. Code powers the simulations that presage and pre-visage most construction, as well as providing critical pre-construction feedback. Virtual life-forms in the form of genetic and evolutionary algorithms, cellular automata and autonomous agents, enable the optimised design of everything from machines to whole cities through the generation of active, self-aware digital systems that are inseparable from the flesh of life itself.

SCRIPTS OVER PICTURES

Code forms the language that more and more architects are learning to write as top-down commercial software cedes to more bottom-up open- source programs.

Programming is evolving on from its ‘graphic’ etymological roots (prographein) as typing displaces drawing as the main tool to generate design, guide its production, and manage its occupancy.

The code landscape is a swiftly-shifting terrain, its languages arising and disappearing in a flash, platforms once prominent soon rapidly extinct as coding pioneers blaze new trails across the frontiers of architectural production. The pervasive prominence of scripting is at once revolutionary and familiar – another niche disciplinary language to be learned, like Masonic stereotomy or Brunelleschian perspective.

DIGITAL DESIGN

The dominant current modus operandi of more cutting-edge designers arose from earlier experiments with life-simulation and the architectural use of animation software. Yet these life-like yearnings typically still reduce the incessant motion of animation effects to unflinching frozen static forms, embalming only the sense and trace of movement, but never its actual flux.

Yet the act of design increasingly merges the operations of biological and digital life forms, entailing its own forms of movement, aided by a host of input devices from mouse to microphone, camera to keyboard, tablet to touchscreen – all conversing with central computer systems that daily become ever more life-like, connected across the web to other similar forms of digital life.

Contemporary “Parametricism” enables powerful adaptive control of core architectural geometries, combining enhanced rationality and unprecedented invention, merging generative geometries, with compositional complexity, procedural efficiency with emergent effects, all with the promise of a quasi-biomimetic functionality to the relationships between parts. Its future deployment beyond mere form-making offers great opportunities for a more thoroughly ecological design process that incorporates complex inputs and factors, finally enabling the age-old dream of biomesis rather than the current vogue for more simplistic sculptural biomorphism.

DIGITAL COLLABORATION

New digital tools are shattering pre-digital notions of ownership, copyright and authorship, promotingco-ownership over isolation, creative collaboration over linear trickle-down hierarchies. Digitality has spurred radical accessibility, and expanded participation. New online working models and spaces like Building (BIM) and City (CIM) Information Modelling afford unprecedented levels of knowledge and power, to the clients and visitors, designers and consultants navigating, experiencing and co-authoring their models and spaces.

As with other emergent media, digitally-enabled architecture invites and incorporates a peer-produced (rather than “price-incentivised”) pantheon of user-generated content. Citizen architecture’ creates a vast range of knowledge platforms, production tools and cross-disciplinary resources deployed across the stages of a building’s life. . Publicdigital tools have radically democratised planning, offering ubiquitous access to hitherto-hidden documentation and information, facilitating the 3-dimensional navigation and site-contextualisation of both existing and proposed spaces, and hosting extended public discussions and debates. ‘

Google is the key corporate aggregator amidst the sea of smaller forums and online spaces. Google 3d Warehouse offers an online repository of open-source digital models that seamlessly blend with - and auto geo-locate in- its sibling worlds of Google Maps and Google Earth, which themselves merge crowd-sourced content with data from institutions. Google’s Map Maker hemps users add grassroots geographic content that is not yet incorporated into Google Maps. Google Buildings offers anyone the opportunity to help openly model the world’s cities using satellite imagery and 3d aerial photography in the same way OpenStreetMap enables amateur neographers to build astonishingly accurate maps (with citizen mapping often far superior to its corporate version – just compare e.g. Baghdad in both).

DIGITAL FABRICATION

Almost all our building materials are made or mixed, cut or constructed, shipped and sold by machines - which in turn are all generally driven by computers. In more sophisticated examples, these separate links are finally forming connected chains, operating in unison while computers edge closer to the very centre of fabrication. Design files for ever larger components and systems can be cut, carved, printed, fused and fabricated direct from desktops in an ever-widening range of materials, with on-site digital fabrication now also increasingly common.

Construction sites now commonly use live computers as much as inanimate drawings, and thus can display and assess a crucial third or fourth dimension, guide component placement, and optimise construction coordination. Advanced computation means previous tendencies towards repetition and genericism will cede in favour of personalisation and customisation, with any embedded computation within a final product offering further opportunity for behavioural adaptation.

INHABITABLE UBICOMP

If information is the new architecture’s lifeblood, computers are its cells. Chips and microprocessors, sensors and networks are now all more vital and integral to the physicality of our built environment than any single pre-digital building material; carbon-fibre might replace steel or ETFE might replace glass, but nothing yet replaces silicone.

Everything in architecture - from a speculative detail to a construction component, a laser-guided beam to a server card – is addressed and located within the deep spatio-temporal universe of digital dimensions that exist alongside and within – not opposite or beyond - the physical spaces we all know. Mark Weiser’s Internet of Things is rapidly spatialising to become an Internet of Spaces, with our architectures acting as occupiable information portals, great aggregations of both space and data, formed of – and housing – both.

NERVOUS PLACES & SENSITIVE SPACES

Distributed sensors are increasingly found in every corner and component of our lives, across the scales from object to city, gathering and relaying streams of data from their myriad digital addresses to distributed processing units, cross-connecting to the abstractions of multiple databases as much as the concrete specifics of built material. Buildings then perform like aggregated sensors themselves within the larger ecology of their host city, as do cities within countries, and countries within planets.

The ambient mobile occupant now forms a crucial constituent part of informational architecture systems, carrying (or wearing) lightweight networked devices (typically phones or tablets) laced with minute sensors and microcontrollers that contribute rich parcels of real-time spatial data. At a larger scale, cars carry many hundreds of sensors that can link to a local pavement as rapidly as inter-planetary satellites; multiple- camera setups alone (one Land Rover has 5) are currently already used to detect traffic speed, lane deviation, proximity (in all directions), near or distant hazards and driver fatigue. As building production automates like the automobile, its spaces will become as highly sensitive and cybernetic.

INHABITABLE INFORMATION

Ubiquitous input devices are matched by an ever wider proliferation of screens and information display systems that offer rich communication to our fellow humans, facilitating knowledge and enhanced context-awareness, and enabling meaningful informed control of our environments. All conceivable surfaces now offer the opportunity for ambient display, illuminating space with content and data, architectural elements themselves now acting not as backdrop but as purveyors of enhanced and augmented reality.

Whilst 3D and retinal displays are still nascent technologies, mostly unavailable, 2D-imagery can increasingly portray twice its own dimensions, affording a window onto virtual,inhabited worlds where users can navigate and construct the temporal and spatial dimensions of digital environments, and interact in unprecedented ways.

PANOPTICISM

The great streams of data generated by these brave new spaces are contingent on what might be thought of surveillance, yet their bottom-up forms of distributed de-centralised monitoring and tracking are often civilian rather than corporate, powered by people and collectives rather than politicians and companies, and thus more accurately termed sousveillance – or information gleaned from beneath.

Popular concerns raised right and left over issues of privacy and data- protection and the perceived threat of ubiquitous surveillance mirror the political turbulence of the previous century, yet ignore the vast opportunities enabled by such informational empowerment, and the requirements for open-ness to facilitate and empower a radically augmented creative collectivism. The Victorians dreamt of automata, precursors of the modern robot, yet our post-mechanical digital dreams are of powers far beyond our own, superseding small-scaled anthrocentrism in favour of a far higher collective intelligence.

PERFORMANCE

Statics cede to kinetics in a postmechanical world where everything is on the move, sensing and activating in turn, each part responding to its neighbour and fellow architecture in a sea of responsiveness that requires active systems rather than passive sculptures We increasingly see buildings as our active partners, and rely on them for results far beyond the c20th-subsistence-level of mere functionality as they rely on us not just for maintenance but all their everyday operations, nourished by our feedback in a symbiotic loop of artificial architectural ecology.

Interactive architecture, like “new media”, is rapidly outdating as a rare and useful distinction, as all buildings begin not only to respond, but to enter into a dialogue with their users, and to operate on the very basis of interaction. Architecture at last promises to offer the cybernetic environments imagined and explored by Gordon Pask, where architecture acts as an interface and an enabling tool – a medium and a pathway rather than a wall and obstacle.

Contemporary architecture is awakening from the mute motionless matter it has always been into an active state of being, connecting rather than dividing, evolving and ongoing as a participatory performance, an inhabited form – or space - of life itself.