In[Form]ation – Architecture of Data & Code Areti Markopoulou

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Implementing Advanced Knowledge

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Today, we are facing a change in paradigm in the field of Architecture. Information Era Technologies and their impacts on architecture are drastically changing, and their relationship calls for new or adapted concepts, where physical space seamlessly intertwines with digital content, and where the language of electronic connections tie in with that of physical connections.We are consequently moving towards a different form of “habitats”, where architecture is not merely inhabited, but becomes technologically integrated, interactive and evolutional.

If computers were once the size of buildings, buildings are now becoming computers, both performative, on I/O Communication protocols, and programmable, at material-molecule nanoscale, or even operational thanks to self-learning genetic algorithms.

If the Industrial Revolution brought the cities we inhabit today, the Information Society is bringing now to cities a digital revolution of hyper-connection beyond physical proximity and the capacity of physical and virtual interaction. The new principles and technologies contribute to rethink the functioning and structure of the streets, avenues, squares and infrastructure of the City along time.

Architecture and ICT open up a series of possibilities and new projects in different architectural scales (from nanoscale of matter, to buildings and cities), from bits to geography.

Architecture is presenting the development of new design ideas and bottom-up processes where importance is not final aesthetics but rather than data and information that prepare the ground for the birth of efficient, responsive and in-formed architecture of cities and buildings. 

In[Form]ation- Architecture of Data & Code(This article has already been published)

Figure 1 - IAAC Translated Geometries, R.Shambayati,E.Baseta, E.Tancal, 2014 - Archigram, Walking City, 1964

Cover - Nodes Network: Customized visualization based on J.Tarbel, Node Attribution 2.0 generic

In[formed] Buildings (figure 01)In the early 20th century, the concept of ‘dwelling’ was defined as a ‘machine for living’ (Le Corbusier), a reference to a new way of understanding the construction of inhabitable spaces that characterized the Machine Age. Today, a century later, we face the challenge of constructing intelligent and sustainable prototypes; living organisms that interact and interchange resources with their environment, following the principles of ecology or biology rather than those of mere construction and which function as entirely self-sufficient and responsive nodes with the potential to use and produce resources.

Matter is becoming digital, technologies allow to start computing the construction atoms and Buildings are formed based on material, computational and artificial Intelligence.

The extended use of smart materials such as shape-memory materials, piezoelectric, thermoelectric or bio-materials able to adjust their properties in different environmental conditions allow to programme buildings at a nanoscale, and open up a series of applications on an architectural scale and industrial applications. Furthermore, new composite materials that present preset combinations of mechanical properties or multi-functional properties of non-homogeneous materials in shape and composition across a wide range of scales bring forth the exploration of a shift in design culture, taking us to a new level of material awareness. Material Intelligence in combination with Artificial and Computational Intelligence, simulations, sensors, actuators, as well as with bio-mimetic innovations provide revolutionary ideas on growth, adaptability, repair, sensitivity, replication and energy savings in architecture.

Should we continue constructing rigid and fixed structures?Or can buildings begin to think?

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In parallel with the advancements of the information era technologies, the challenges generated by global urbanization, economic instability and the increasing awareness relative to the environmental crisis have raised new questions regarding design methodologies, production techniques, and the potentials of cross-disciplinary design research and projects.

Within this new global context, the rapid change and potential of the digital technologies it is imperative to introduce a new paradigm on architectural form and aesthetics. Form followed function for an important period of the architectural history. Today we have the tools to allow Form to Follow information such as energy and people flows, solar path, environmental conditions and users ever-changing needs. Examples of buildings such as the Fab Lab House or the Endesa pavilion (figure 3), are pioneers on the new paradigm of in[form]ed architecture. The two houses are parametrically designed and their form follows the data of the solar path of the area to be implemented, meaning parameters of longitude and latitude of the specific site. The final form is the outcome of an optimization of all possible variations, that the software can quickly calculate, so as the buildings could collect the maximum of the solar energy along the year. The houses are able to generate twice as much the energy that they need to consume, through flexible or rigid solar cells adjusted to the optimum form of the buildings.

Fab Lab House has been entirely digitally fabricated by a group of researchers and students at IAAC tackling the very important aspect of sustainability related with local production and minimization of energy and monetary costs included in logistics and transportation.

This last example brings us to a second path of Material Intelligence, that of Digital Fabrication. In design, architecture and many other disciplines, Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) fabrication equipment has given designers unprecedented means for executing formally challenging projects directly from the computer. Digital fabrication gives us the potential and the

Figure 3 - IAAC Solar Buildings, Endesa Pavilion 2012, Fab Lab House 2010Figure 5 -IaaC 2013, Pylos, Sofoklis Giannakopoulos with Monolite/D-Shape

ability to design and fabricate building components with varied properties of density, translucency, elasticity and much more. Though, until now, Digital Fabrication tools are used by the designers to materialize their design by accessing materials as a library of consistent and physically homogeneous properties. “Functionally graded digital fabrication is a novel design approach offering the potential to program physical matter. It expands the potential of prototyping, since the varying of properties allows for optimization of material properties relative to their structural and functional performance, and for formal expressions directly and materially informed by environmental stimuli” 1

The potential of applying digital manufacturing in construction is found on the possibilities of crossing traditional limits in construction and explore new technologies and tools that produce new processes. (figure 5)

Gravity, for instance, has been always a clear limitation to the architectural constructions. New additive manufacturing processes in combination with new robotic tools for material deposition allow to model and build structures in an anti-gravity mode, using polymer mixes for new automatized data-based construction systems. (figure 4) This innovative additive manufacturing method allows objects to be formed on any given working surface independently of its inclination and smoothness, without a need of support structures. It’s a method that would allow making three-dimensional laminae or curves instead of two-dimensional ones, as it happens in conventional additive manufacturing methods.

Other pioneer fabrication techniques include the creation of composite materials (silicone and wood) to provide a basic panel system for designers

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Figure 4 - IaaC 2012, Mataerial, Petr Novikov, Saša Jokić with Joris Laarman LabFigure 6 - IaaC 2013, Ground Floor, Moritz Begle

and architects who can assemble or even re-design it according to their needs. Conforming to the density and where the cuts are being placed , different angles of deformation can be approached . (figure 06)

The Silicone in this research takes over two functions. On the one hand, it is part of the air/water system and on the other it connects the panels to each other for creating a larger component-based surface. In other words structure, system and joint are out of the same material.

Finally, we are able to combine digital manufacturing techniques with smart and active material manipulation. This field is exploring how Digital

Fabrication goes beyond assigning material properties into rigid construction components. A 3d printer is used to deposit different densities of multi-coloured conductive gel on a window panel. Dots of CMY color expand when they receive an electrical impulse creating a new kind of window that mimics the camouflage capabilities of an octopus’s skin by changing colour in response to an electrical impulse. (figure 07)

The challenge of constructing buildings following principles of biology and ecology is taking us into another dimension of design awareness. From “dewling as a ‘machine for living’ (Le Corbusier) that characterized the Machine Age we pass to “dewling” as living organism that interact with environment and users characterizing the Information Age.

In[form]ed Cities (figure08 and figure09)The advances in the building design technologies and construction cannot be separated by the affects at the urban scale. In this way, each action on the territory implies a manipulation of multiple environmental forces, connected to numerous informational flows and networks such as energy, transport, logistics and information, generating new inhabitable and responsive nodes with the potential to use and produce resources. Territorial and urban strategies and building operations must therefore be coordinated processes that extend architectural knowledge to new forms of management and planning, in which a multiscalar thinking also entails an understanding of shifting dynamics, energy and information transmission and continuous adaptation.

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The city is a connective network among human beings and their activities. This is what led to urbanization in the first place: individuals clustered so that communication distances would shrink to a minimum, while the number of connective nodes increased.2

We are currently facing a new phase of urbanization with a real need for major innovation in urban design, technologies and services. The next 40 years will see an unprecedented transformation in the global urban landscape. In the next three decades the number of people living in cities will soar from 3.6 billion to 6.3 billion and by 2025 there will be 37 megacities, each with a population of more than 10 million. 3

Figure 7 - IaaC 2013, Kaleidoscope, Dulce LunaFigure 8 - IaaC 2013, Smart Public Space

Information and communication technologies will be deeply embedded in the fabric of both old and new cities and will change the way we think of city operations and how we live and work in these environments.

After all, urban environments have always stood in close relationship to the technologies of production, transport, and communications. The application of  ICT in spatial planning can be conceptualized as a new type of infrastructure for the transport of invisible - though measurable– data, that allow cities to perform as organisms and become behavioural.

Projects such as the “City Protocol”4 and “Smart Public Space” are research agendas initiated by IAAC in the effort of understanding the ICT implementation in urban environments and how cities could be responsive to environmental or social data and users needs.

Why do streets continue to route traffic in the same direction over time?How do people interact with the public space?What happens when the Internet of the things becomes the Internet

of the cities?

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Figure 9 - Le Corbusier, la ville radieuse,1930-31 / IAAC Smart Street Hotel, Drew Carson, Alejandra Díaz de León, Dulce Luna, Pryanca Nagula.

Cities are dynamic ecosystems, meanwhile traditional urban planning is still laying on approximate data. Once we manage to monitor in real-time the continuously changing data of our urban environment we will be able to plan dynamic relationships over static programmatic distributions and programme the city over its different times.

Urban applications and real time visualizations substitute the traditional static cartographies and enable new personalized perceptions of the city. Furthermore, such applications contribute on raising awareness and allow communities and users to adopt their behavior or define their actions based on efficiency factors.

Cities functioning as an operating system are able to filter water (kidney system), to manage ventilation and air quality (lung system), to locate and balance traffic levels (visual system), to process waste in order to produce biofuel (digestive system), to create real-time data urban farming irrigation systems, to blur the lines of the current highways and pavements with responsive tile systems.

Citizens, on the other hand, are able to visualize their neighborhood data, to participate in public space distribution, to access urban interfaces and open data platforms, to calculate the shortest routes to their destination, to be aware of their energy consumption impact in their urban block and finally be part of an urban evolution based on self-organization rules related to local parameters, social or emotional factors when occupying space.

Far beyond sensors and monitoring systems, the new type of cities emerging is not just an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by the information superhighway.5 The future urban planning and urban management calls for connection with concepts such as Open Innovation or new citizen-based services and the necessary processes and tools on how cities, surrounding regions and rural areas can evolve towards sustainable open and user-driven innovation ecosystems to boost Future Internet-enabled services of public interest and citizen participation.

The great challenge for a new urban metabolism lies in the city’s capacity to interact, to give and receive information among interconnected nodes with different scales and natures: infrastructure, buildings, elements of the public space, environmental conditions, flows and so on. This anticipates fundamental concepts related to the importance of proposing symbiotic systems of organization based on real-time data that can be further articulated into responsive systems and metabolic organizations, where small decisions can have a large impact at an urban scale.

We are moving, thus, towards a different [form] of “habitats”, where we don’t just inhabit our architecture but we integrate, interact and evolve with it. Internet of Cities, Buildings of which form and matter follow data and Materials responding to environmental conditions and digital content are part of an architecture that is not just mimicking the living but is roaring into life.

It is necessary to generate complex knowledge with a multi-layered reading of realities that have traditionally been thought of as separate, such as energy manipulation, nature, urban mobility, dwelling, systems of production and fabrication, the development of software and information networks. This opens up the possibility of generating new architectural prototypes, based on principles of different disciplines and capable of engaging with complex and adaptive environments.

No doubt, if ever there was a time to go deeper into the architectural metabolism through new multidiciplinar and technological models applied in our “habitats”, this is certainly it.

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Notes and References1. N Oxman, ‘Methods and Apparatus for Variable Property Rapid Prototyping’,2. Nikos Salingaros, Introduction Article, “Networked City:, IAAC GSS, 20103. Navigate Research, “Smart Cities - Infrastructure, Information, and Communications Technologies for Energy, Transportation, Buildings, and Government: City and Supplier Profiles, Market Analysis, and Forecasts”, 2013 www.navigantresearch.com4. Navigate Research, “Smart Cities - Infrastructure, Information, and Communications Technologies for Energy, Transportation, Buildings, and Government: City and Supplier Profiles, Market Analysis, and Forecasts”, 2013 www.navigantresearch.com5. William J. Mitchell, 1996. City of Bits. Space, Place and the Infobahn, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Figure 10 - IAAC Translated Geometries, R.Shambayati,E.Baseta, E.Tancal, 2014

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IAAC SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE:Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, BostonJuan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, MadridNeil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, BostonHanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, LondonVicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of BarcelonaWilly Muller, Director of Barcelona RegionalAaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Mu seum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, LondonNikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Eco logia Urbana, BarcelonaArtur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona

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