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STANISLAV ROUDAVSKI
In an atmosphere of constant change*,
how should an architect learn?
Those who look to the future understand architecture as adynamic sys
tem of relationships. These relationships blur the distinctions between
digital and physical, natural and artificial, simulated and observable in
the wild. Such an interpretation calls for broader collaborations and a
commitment to explorations outside established "comfort zones. But
the life outside disciplinary comforts can be harsh. With old certainties
left behind and new potentials not yet discovered, one can feel over
whelmed by the richness and complexity of available information and
practices. In the contemporary condition of constant and accelerating
change, what should an architect know and be able to do? From where
should this knowledge be acquired and updated, from whom and in
which way?
Innovation (and the learning of the new, needed for innovation to occur)
can be encouraged through various strategies. The Continuing Professional
Development program, participation in which is required to maintain architect
registration in most Australian states, is already in place. Innovation can also be
augmented outside existing professional territories via other types of critical,
open-ended learning that is deliberately oriented towards uncertain futures. In
striving to address unknown demands, such learning is necessarily speculative
and risky. What strategies can be adopted to benefit from such risk-taking?
IDGE-OF-CONTROL PROJECTS
In its capacity to imagine, prototype, critique and implement possible
futures, design has aunique competitive advantage. Architecture's ability
to shape tomorrow's places is more significant than its role in producing
buildings. The Church of Colonia Giiell, Sydney Opera House or Guggenheim
Museumin Bilbao matter less as objects of practical convenience and more as
narratives of innovation that inspire future experimentation. In the face of
daunting challenges, these projects had to advance well beyond contempo
rary practices and are now seen as precursors - respectively - to form-finding
approaches, computational structural analysis and integrated designing of
complex geometries.
It seems likely that in the future, increasing proportions of situated
social life will be sustained by digital technologies that have been designed
and produced outside of architecture and without architects. In an extreme
case, the buildings surrounding New York's Times Square are now nothing
Top
Composed fromthe intersection of nine spheres, Double Agent White
by Marc Fornes was created using the Python programming language at
Atelier Calder in July 2012. Photography: Guillaume Blanc
Bottom
Gramazio &Kohler and Raffaello D'Andrea in cooperation with ETH
Zurich has developed Flight Assembled Architecture, where flying robots
assemble ascale model in brick using open-source software.
Francois Lauginie
Cite as: Roudavski, Stanislav
(2012). Frontier Learning,
Architecture Australia, Sept/Oct,
pp. 88-90
Architectural-computing workshops have become increasingly important to
developing innovation in design and practice. Pictured: SmartGeometry 2011 at
the School of Architecture in Copenhagen. Photography: Anders Ingvartsen
but scaffolds for moving-image ads, with no internal habitation. Such
media facade systems are standard rectilinear screens that are disconnected
from the specificities of their hosts. Their commercial content is also out
of architects' control. And yet, with adequate expertise, such systems can
be productively integrated with architectural design objectives as demon
strated, for instance, by Tim and Jan Edler's Berlin practice Realities:united.
Its projects, such as the BIX media facade for Graz Art Musseum, use simple
but bespoke components, project-specific geometries and innovative cura
torial strategies for the provision of media content, while integrating
it seamlessly into the building's skin. In the case of such hybrid envi
ronments, learning that is focused on conventional building types is
insufficient. In order to cope with new challenges and demonstrate archi
tecture's ability to contribute to new kinds of places, the discipline ought to
extend beyond the boundaries of its institutional knowledge and to the very
edges of its creative control.
How do we get to the edge of control? One site of such advancement is
in architecture schools, which can, and should, sustain creative research
explorations into new possibilities. For example, The Emergent Technologies
and Design Program at the Architectural Association School of Architecture
in London, run by Michael Weinstock, is productive in straying from current
industry expectations and moving towards speculations on the future of
practice. It extends past conventional types by adopting afocus on biologi
cal materials systems and seeking to derive new approaches to form-making
not from the canonical knowledge of the discipline applied to particular
sites and briefs, but from systematic analysis of biological systems and from
speculations on their potentials in architecture. An example might involve
computational and physical examinations of a tree structure in terms of
organization and structural performance, an implementation of its branch
ing using L-systems, finite element analysis of resulting structures and
reimplementation of the branching in a site-aware fashion.
CRITICAL PEDAGOGIES
In arapidly changing world with many possible edge-of-control projects,
which ones do we choose? Given the impossibility of definitive forecasting,
one ought to prepare for multiple possible and incompatible futures. Critical
pedagogies are effective for such preparations because they encourage
conflict as astrategy that is capable of sustaining multiple alternatives.
Outside of architecture schools, architectural-computing workshops have
become particularly important for cultivation of multiplicity. Hundreds of
diverse workshops take place every year with some events - such as the
annual SmartGeometry workshop - run in multiple topical streams by peer-
selected teams. SmartGeometry attracts adiverse crowd of practitioners,
academics and students from a broad range of backgrounds and is effective
as acatalyst in many communities of practice. This event has been hosted
on different continents and its topics have ranged from digital fabrication to
real-time data gathering, from geometry optimization to dynamic simula
tion and from digital crafting to building information modelling.
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In order to be efficient in borrowing from the field and effective in contrib
uting to it, speculative projects and critical pedagogies need to be "total."
They cannot afford to be confined to formal educational institutions, early-
career training or particular specialisms. Openly shared development of
tools and techniques helps to produce lasting value by distributing respon
sibility and control, wasting less energy in redoing things, reducing the risk
of failure and enabling broader access to ideas. Such open collaborative
approaches require engagement with programming because computer code
allows rigorous communication across disciplines. The ability to program
becomes more than apurely technical skill - it is aprincipled stance in sup
port of collaborative innovation, creative freedom and future relevance.
Python programming language is agood example of anon-proprietary
collaborative environment that supports amature ecosystem of tools for
many computing tasks. Python has been incorporated into many commercial
content-creation programs such as Rhino and Maya. It can also be used to
control other programs, including AutoCAD, 3ds Max, Revit and Inventor.
Python can link these programs with each other and reach out to the exten
sive interdisciplinary research beyond.
The open-source movement is becoming similarly influential in physi
cal computing, as evidenced by the popularity of Arduino, an open-source
electronic prototyping platform for the creation of interactive electronic
objects. A picturesque example of the possibilities is the Flight Assembled
Architecture project by Gramazio &Kohler and Raffaello D'Andrea and the
Architecture and Digital Fabrication unit of the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology (ETH Zurich). In this project, acurvilinear form of asix-
hundred-metre "vertical village" is assembled as a 1:100 model by ateam
of quadrotor helicopter drones. Such unmanned aerial systems can be
built with Arduino-compatible components developed within open-source
communities such as DIY Drones. Inheriting cheap miniature sensors and
processors from massively popular smartphones, robots produced in this
way already outdo their military counterparts in terms of prices (dramati
cally), functionality and avariety of applications, prompting avision of
open-source personal robotics that, in the near future, will be as ubiquitous as
personal computing is today.
Speculative learning, sustained by exploratory, critical and total pedago
gies, provides opportunities to consider relevant, questionably relevant
and frankly "out there issues, and encourages unorthodox thinking about
career paths, business models and cross-disciplinary collaborations. A good
example is the effort to re-imagine the discipline through recent innova
tive programs such as The Product-Architecture Lab at Stevens Institute of
Technology in the US. This program sees architecture as adomain where
computation is at the centre of all core processes. Mixing architecture, engi
neering, product design and interaction, it expects fluency in computational
methodologies from future designers, including abilities to use performance
criteria to guide form, employ computation in fabrication and use sophisti
cated data management. The program acknowledges limitations of school
environments and stages close collaborations with innovative designers,
engineers, scientists and manufacturers.
Rethinking the discipline through speculative and inclusive edge-of-
control projects is adifficult challenge that requires systematic forays into
the unknown. These journeys outside disciplinary comfort zones need to be
consciously encouraged by the architectural community. Supporting critical
and total pedagogies, for example through the structures of accreditation
or targetted funding for speculative work, can help to reconfigure learning
patterns that focus on the lessons of the past into those that are also capa
ble of preparing for the future.
Stanislav Roudavski practises, teaches and researches digital
architectural design at the University of Melbourne. He has previously
worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
University of Cambridge.
......................, , at the University of Melbourne emphasizes
Inpursuit of acritical pedagogy, the Virtual Environments course aWe architectureas one of many
analysis and use of nature-inspired processes for form-making o 3phy. Stanis,av Roudavski
approaches to architectural creativity. Model byTammy Hu.
90 SEPT/ OCT202
DOSSIER