Today we had a pinup review with Andrew and 5 other Faculty. Our task, for studio, was to develop a schematic massing for a cellular colony of buildings – about the size and shape of the solar decathlon houses. The units were to be off-grid and able to be delivered to the site by truck. The idea was that we’d take one of the ‘cells’ and develop it into the solar decathlon project (There’s more about the program on the class blog).
The research I’d done into Cellular Automata scripting served me well in developing an aggregation strategy for the units. I simply devised a new set of 6 rules, loosely based on typical CA operation, but specific to architecture.
Each rule was given a probability, meaning it would only happen a percentage of the time. This gave the pattern a degree of randomness and dynamism where, otherwise, the buildings would form a very regular grid almost immediately as the southern exposure rule took precedence. Below is an example of the script working:
The reviewers’ response to my project was basically “cool process, but its implementation, ie: the ideas behind the actual project, need some work”
The best point of the day for me was when I really “got” the point behind this phase of the studio: working by looking for the synergies between seemingly conflicting programmatic goals and sites.
In short, the process can be distilled into these 5 verbs:
Analyze, Distill, Extract, Adapt, and Apply
My work in the next few weeks will focus on other self organizing systems (like the inner workings of biological systems and urban development patterns) and see what phenomena can be brought over and turned into a script.
More soon…..
Chris Chalmers is a student of the Master of Architecture program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is currently in his third year and researching self-organizing systems and computation in architecture.
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