Upload
natkhew
View
213
Download
0
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
1/16
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.
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
2/16
SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies
Author: Yu Nong Khew
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
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
3/16
SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies
Author: Yu Nong Khew
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
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
4/16
SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies
Author: Yu Nong Khew
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.
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
5/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
6/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
7/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
8/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
9/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
10/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
11/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
12/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
13/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
14/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
15/16
8/13/2019 KhewYuNong_AI_ Parametric Urban Spread
16/16