KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread

8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread

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SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies

Author: Yu Nong Khew

Artificial Intelligence: Parametric Urban Spread

"Architecture is intellectually, methodologically and materially connected to other

fields in ways never before imaginable. It is becoming a less pure and more

composite discipline. Architectural processes are thus constitutionally affected by

logics traditionally defined as lying outside the field...... Architecture is systemically

already linked to city and industry. On a macro-scale a chimerical logic binds

architecture into cultural, commercial and industrial ecology. It considers

architecture in terms of product systems and related processes. Viewed in this way

architecture is but one system organically interconnected with many others such as

artificial object-systems and infrastructures as well as natural ecosystems. With the

increasing sophistication of emergent software and emergent materials it is possible

to design cities, processes and architecture that together exhibit the qualities and

behavior of naturalized systems."1

Conventional urban design methods often lead to the traditional methods of master planning using

systemic layering and constitutional infrastructural planning. On the contrary, this project makes use

of modern Artificial Intelligence software such as a plug-in in Maya, Brainbugz, and particle dynamics,

which mimic insect behavioral movements. Instead of conventional master planning, which is a non-

debatable, top-down and rigid strategy, the studio is proposing a more robust, less top-down

controlled and more self-organizational design strategy. Conventional master planning involves the

extraction of complex urban built-up into isolated layers of categories. Also, by falsely assuming that

systems operate the same way in isolation as they do in aggregation, the conventional method of

master planning typically fails to recognize networks in complicated systems. In the layered method,

connectivity is viewed as linkage, not as constitutional. The approach installs individual urban

systems not in layers but as massive crowds of intelligent agents, i.e. Brainbugz. "Each group

corresponding to an urban system has its own identity which is embedded as parametric behavior.


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The third master planning concept addresses the temporality of urban design, expressed in phases.

The main problem with this approach is that it is not adaptive in nature. This poses a huge problem

for the life expectancy of a master plan as master plan phases are generally medium to long-term,

meaning that altered conditions falling between the start- and end-time of the designs

implementation will lead to obsoleteness even as the design is still in progress. On the contrary, this

method is dynamic. This is because the self-organizational nature of urban entities (as intelligent

agents) evolves within controlled time intervals. Parametric adaptation and emergence are two

qualities of these kinds of "spatial organizations that are a function of time-based methods involving

memory and learning. Urban agents remember and thereby learn and change their behavior over

time.

Finally, the method allows for the simulation of life cycle processes in urban design. Viability of

particular urban systems (as intelligent agents) is contingent on the circumstances (as represented in

other agent groups or environmental conditions) that support or weaken it.

As the method shifts from layering to networked-ness, the project generates the continual self-

organization of emergent systems consisting of heterogeneous agent groups into contingent and

temporal associations and hybrid organizations (formal and otherwise). These formations are

interrelated as fuzzy sets with situational and open-ended associations between these evolving

hybrid classes. Coupled with the rethinking of spatiality there is a re-conception of temporality here.

Linear time concepts -implying obsolescence- are replaced with notions of feedback

and looping - implying renewal. We already see the application of these concepts in

industrial ecology through the advance from cradle-to-grave to cradle-to-cradle

models."3


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ecology about patch dynamics, this is a worst case scenario. In patches with these characteristics,

environmental pathologies multiply. As such, introducing wetlands to this area not only reduces the

damages to the existing area, but also starts to reverse engineer a new sustainability into this space.

The bazaar is known to all that it has a consumer-related business. As such, it will tie in hand in hand

with the wetlands to be introduced to the site. In urban sustainability, this creates a cycle of inlet-

outlet-inlet possibility, meaning that the bazaar will create refuse and the wetlands, clean up and re-

feed into this system of in and outs. The city now has a cleansing mechanism, (wetlands) coupled

with a feeding mechanism. (bazaar) This is hoped that the cycle of taking waste from the existing site

and breaking them down into fertilizers for the flowers that will go into the flower market within the

bazaar starts to paint a picture of continuity, and not one that belongs to the conventional master

planning era, where often many existing programs do not get to play a role in connecting with new

programs introduced into the area.

In the research project, there was the attempt to redefine the scale of a conventional bazaar using

the Artificial Intelligence software mentioned previously. Conventional large scale bazaars are often

planned in an extremely hierarchical manner, such that entrances, plazas, shops and open spaces

are seen as nodal points, (Image of a City by Kevin Lynch) instead of the city being an urban

continuum. In this project, the existing typologies of bazaars in Istanbul were taken apart and studies

were made on these "dissected typologies" as smaller scaled modules that would ultimately

contribute to the urban built-up of the city.

Applying the most basic existing form of the dome in a bazaar, one created many different

possibilities of a single cell of a bazaar and arrayed these different cells across the topology of the

existing site. This topology has been also redefined in terms of mapping methods, such that instead

of using contours, one used voronoi cells previously attained from the insect behavior of the


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typologies of such existing programs found in today's world, only planned vastly different in terms of

hierarchical and topological factors. Instead of defining in a blueprint where a building will stand,

this project looks at what a program needs in its simplest form, and propagates the various cells

across a newly defined topological map. Although keeping the formal ideas of the existing programs,

by changing the idea that a plan is one that is drawn from knowing the site boundaries, one

managed to come up with something that is typologically different and varied.

The city is now connected in multiple layers and bunches, instead of being dependent on nodes,

vistas, pathways, boundaries and disconnects.


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KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread