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Progress beyond the state of the art
Patrik Schumacher 2004
Published In: Architettura Magazine
The exhibition “AAproject review”, organized by the
Architectural Association School of Architecture is a kind of starting
point to begin a tour through an emerging architectural debate, exploring
a new research field, where a different architecture might soon take
form. We are looking at a territory where art, architecture, technology,
and science merge to find a new avenue of research.
Patrik Schumacher, partner of Zaha Hadid, teaching at
the AADRL post graduate course, speaks about these new domains of architecture
which represent a tough challenge for the architectural world of tomorrow,
explaining his point of view and the variety of approaches taken by
his students.
Q : “AAProject
review” is the name of the exhibition being organized by the Architectural
Association.
It represents one of the London’s must-see cultural
events, attracting visitors from around the world.
It’s a time when the AAschool opens its doors to the
wider community, challenging perception and encouraging debate on the
role of the architect and the discipline of architecture, now and in
the future, locally, and globally. What is your opinion about the exhibition
as a manifestation of current thinking and production?
Patrik Schumacher:
I think that the Project review at the AA is not aimed
at the general public
or any kind of cultural tourism. It
is an event internal to the discipline or profession, and, curiously,
an event with particular importance to the internal communication of
the school itself, i.e. a mirror which the school puts up for itself
so that the different units - which during the year develop autonomously
without much contact – can appreciate each other’s work.
But of course the architectural profession, and the
different architecture schools in London make up the larger part of
the audience and if there is a sort of cultural tourist to be considered
it is a group of keen architectural students and young architects coming
from abroad to London to witness the exhibition. In
particular it is the ex-students that want to see the new generation
work and who would like to keep in touch and update themselves with
respect to the latest obsessions circulating in the school. In fact
the school is moving very fast so that it is necessary to come every
year to keep up with its pace of development.
In general it is important to understand that there
is an internal discourse of the architectural discipline and profession
which does not make a lot of sense to the general public. Why should
the general public be confronted with design processes, abstract concepts
or unfinished experiments? These issues only concern the community
of designers themselves.
Q: The
AA is a school where new ideas germinate and are expressed. The exhibition
of projects shows this vitality. Can
we consider this production as a “new architectural avant-garde”?
How could you describe the concept of progress in architecture,
today?
Patrik Schumacher:
Since the discipline of architecture has no dedicated
research institutions and no research funding, it is the educational
institutions on the one hand and the avant-garde segment of the profession
on the other hand that take on the function of research and innovation,
which in other disciplines is pursuit by dedicated research institutions.
The private manufacturing sector has developed large corporations that
can afford to establish dedicated R&D departments. Medicine is
supported by publicly funded research institutes operating within the
University system. In the architectural world there is neither private
nor public funding for research.
Schools like the AA, and in particular the post-graduate
courses and the diploma courses , play a crucial role in a process
of research and innovation. And the work as well as the human resources
feed directly into the avant-garde segment of the profession. This phenomenon involves a small number
of high profile schools in the architectural world, and the AAschool
is certainly operating in the forefront of the international avant-garde
discourse. This research is conducted by both teachers and students.
The teachers, who are located at the school, collaborate
with the students, leading the student’s work to participate in this
sort of research. The design work is not primarily understood as a
kind of training, that attempts to teach a kind of standard or state
of the art competency. The work is all about progress beyond the state
of the art via experimentation whereby the results are opening up new
agendas rather than offering finished products. At the same time, the
work can not be measured by a consistent standard.
Q: In the
context of AA, how does the variety of methods and approaches operate
with respect to imagining
and creating better alternatives to what already exists.
Patrik Schumacher:
First of all I want to reiterate that it
is all about finding alternatives to what exists, and yet it is naiv
to expect that these alternatives are immediatly better than what exists
as well-tested solutions. Alternatives in this context are first groping
steps into new directions, offering potentials and opportunities for
further research, not polished superior solutions. At its best this
work points ahead towards better solutions.
The question also talks about the variety of the methods
and approaches that operate within the school. Sometimes the school
prides itself of having a large diversity of approaches on offer.
This looks like an advantage, but I think that this
can also be a disadvantage if the different units within the school
are not focussed on one shared direction. With
a shared focus comes productive competition instead of ideological
strife. It means that the different units have a lot to say to each
other and a lot to learn from each other. I think that the school is
self-organised in the sense that it forms coherent movements within
itself, which reduces diversity temporarily and creates clusters of
different units working on the same thing. This originates as a group
dynamic within the student body, perhaps despite the diverse body of
teachers.
I think this is very important. You might compare the
AAschool with its main competititor Columbia university in this respect,
and I would say that Columbia has been more coherent. It is true that
the AA has more diversity on offer, but there are also current movements
which are running between those two schools, and this creates avenues
of research in which many teachers and students feel that they are
participating in a unified research agenda.
Q: What
should the visitor perceive moving through this aesthetic experience
of the exhibition? Is it more art or architecture? Is it implying an
utopian or radical vision of the society?...or a new way to describe
different concepts of architectural space … or a futuristic way to
live?
Patrik Schumacher:
I understand your question to be asking whether
we are more concerned with spatial form or with the social content.
In the end, we have to be concerned with both. Innovation
is innovation of architectural form, of spatial form, or spatial organization,
of the logic of connection etc., but this makes only sense if in the
end the life process takes on this new form and also requires such
a new form; so it is always the double research, in terms of the spatial
vocabularies which need to be developed on the one hand and in terms
of the social tendencies, or institutional patterns on the other hand.
It is very hard to do both very well in one and the same project. Therefore you usually have the schism between units which
are focussing more on the social research and those other groups who
are working on complex spatial forms and perhaps those who are moving
on to questions of structure and manufacturing. It
seems unfortunate that thus there are two quite separate cultures of
research, but in the end this (temporary) separation and division of
labour is necessary. However,
the final fusion and collaboration of these two areas of research is
equally necessary.
Another point to underline about the strong experience
that the exhibition offers, is that it implies that the students are
not confining their ambition to the display of drawings, or abstract
representations of ideas, but they want to offer a kind of experiential
simulation, a kind of immersive space which stands in for the building
they would like to design. The exhibition space is not only showing
architectural representations but it becomes itself a designed space
that explores various spatial concepts.
Q: Your
students have investigated the concept of “responsive environment”
trying to make an original contribution to this new and complex field.
But what really does it mean within the architectural debate? What is your approach to the concept?
Patrik Schumacher:
“Responsive Environments” is the title of our current
research agenda. It is a fantastic challenge, it is a totally new field
of design, and perhaps it is not even necessary to assume that architecture
will be able to successfully claim this new field as its own territory.
Instead “responsive environments” might become an independent field
and it might become a field of collaboration between industrial design
and interaction design which currently is just a sub-discipline of
web-site design which in turn still operates out of graphic design.
Out of interaction design might emerge a group of people who work both
in real and virtual environments.
Anyhow I think architecture, perhaps, is the most crucial
design discipline to take over this new domain. We foresee the possibility
that most (if not all) architectural space will become responsive and
be animated through intelligent kinetic capacities. Each space will
have a series of sensors which allow the occupational patterns within
the space to be registered and fed back into the intelligent responsive
structures. This can operate on many scales and levels.
I think what emerges is a new era within architecture,
or between architecture and some other disciplines, which will have
a big market in the future, we are convinced of that.
It will be the next big thing in technological development.
We, as AADRL, are an isolated research and design unit
– struggling in solitude, for a number of years already, to take on
this chalenge. The only kind of people which have been working with
such environments so far are artists or robotics engineers with ties
to the art world. So within the domain of art there exists a series
of pieces, installations ,environments, which work with interactivity.
This is just one more example that shows how the domain of art is the
most open, the most underdetermined area of social and technological
research. It is here that the new phenomena are picked up first and
experimented with. Here it is possible to invest without pragmatic
purpose and performance criteria. And when architecture takes on this
developing field this implies that we are already one step beyond the
stage of pure play or the pure magic of technological possibilities
and effects. When architecture gets involved it means that we are trying
to take these mere open ended possibilities to the next level by assuming
operating conditions in institutional settings and meaningful social
scenarios.
For instance, we have been looking at the deployment
of responsive systems within residential complexes, as well as corporate
environments with an eye towards linking up with innovative tendencies
within recent business organisation. At the moment we are working on
airports as fields that sustain multiple programmes that might benefit
from new behavioural capacities of their environment.
Q: The
DRL research tries to investigate how to genuinely evolve rather than
design, a new kind of ambient, and immersive architecture. Using advanced
software tools it is able to create, control and shape a new concept
of space, where the dynamic of the people-flows and its self-organising
reconfigurations are reflected in the scripted responses of a kinetically
adaptive space.
There is this new capacity to design spaces that actively
engage with their users to create complex behavioural systems. What
do you think about it?
Patrik Schumacher:
I think at the Design Research Lab we are trying to
develop these new behavioural capacities, as we said earlier, which
have previously been explored in art. We are also trying to bring in
ideas from robotics and bio-mimetics. We are opening up this new technological
paradigm for the new opportunity to design a social space as a living
interactive space, on an urban scale, or on the scale of a building,
or on the scale of a room or interface. The task is very ambitious.
The difficulty is that it requires a whole series of advanced disciplines
and technical capacities. As a school we can not buy the necessary
expertise in the form of specialist consultants. Instead we have to
develop our own skill base from within our pool of students. We create
teams which within themselves should diversifies to various kind of
expertises. We need form makers and we need to develop structures,
we need to develop kinetic mechanisms and we also we need students
who have analytical capacities and finally those who are able to acquire
some basic understanding of computer programming. And also we need
some groups of students which have a developed social imagination and
can move into the observation, analysis and simulation of collective
human behaviour. This involves a kind of definition of behavioural
patterns that lead to the programming of agents are able to self-organize
into life-like patterns. Such simulated behaviors can then be compared
with observed patterns found in public spaces, perhaps video recorded
by the students. The patterns of movement in public spaces are to be
observed, and their social logic has to be understood and reconstructed
via programmed agents. We take this as a design domain sui generis.
This is part of the expanded paradigm of architectural design we are
promoting. We are no longer just designing the empty shell but we are
also conceiving the kind of choreography of use-patterns that unfolds
within and in interaction with our structures. This is a rather new
exciting departure for architecture. The desire to do this was always
there. Architectures ultimate ambition was always about designing the
social life by means of designing its container. Now we have the capacity
to simulate such behaviours within their designed environments. This
is an enormous leap in our design capacity afforded by the software
tools like 3ds max or Maya - enhanced
by various plug-ins. Those tools were initially developed for the film
industry. Now these animation tools allow us to design interactive
and self-organising scenarios.
Q: At the
AA exhibition ,the DRL presents its designs using various sensor as
well as actuator technologies linked by computer that simultaneously
respond to the spatial organization of the visitors. At the same time,
robotic prototypes show ever more advanced forms of artificial intelligence
and kinetic capacities. And also the current research is focused to
develop tools to design and simulate responsive systems of dynamic
interaction involving techniques like scripting, force-fields, inverse
kinematics etc. Which new domains, in your opinion, is this research
opening ?
Patrik Schumacher:
The kind of animation software we are using, is opening
not only new technical options but also a whole new way of thinking.
We are modelling artificial worlds with their own peculiar laws of
quasi-nature. It is really like creating a little universe whereby
every object or element can be interactively related to any the other
object or element. Properties and relations of elements within an artificial
world can be scripted into functions, chain reactions and complex networks
of interaction. It is like writing the laws of an artificial universe.
So you can make a whole system of lawful correlations
and let them run through everchanging scenarios. That is a fascinating
new departure. The advancement of software tools means that the learning
curve to create such a world is made user friendly to the point that
the specialist computer programmer is no longer necessary. The creative
designer can create these fascinating interactive worlds. These are
worlds that first of all exist in the computer, but they can be implemented
in the real world as sensors, actuators and chips become ever more
available. And this implementation of responsive models is another
big step we are currently working towards – first in the form of scaled
models. We are creating models which are activated by pneumatic muscles
and which are wired up with a series of sensors to really create the
first kind of prototype of an responsive environment. We presented
three such models for the exhibition “Latent Utopia” which I curated
for a performing arts festival in Graz last year. The AADRL students
where exhibiting among an illustrous series of international avant-garde
architects .
We were showing the same kinetic prototypes at the AA
exhibition this year. These models are not just fascinating gadgets
but they are embetted within a larger project which is discussed with
respect to its social significance and aesthetic implications.
Q: You
said :”Any parameter of any object might be dynamically correlated
with any parameter of any other object within the model”. This means
that the designer has the freedom and the power to craft artificial
worlds, each with their peculiar “laws of nature”. Is that the key
to reading these new responsive spaces? Have we arrived at what could
be called a mutation stage?
Patrik Schumacher:
First of all, I think this is very important. The objects
and the elements we design are always nodes in a kind of dynamic network
of elements and relations, they don’t stand autonomously. You can not
design one after the other in isolation. As you design the next object
you consider its impact on the first object. The first object in turn
shifts its identity in the chain of interlinked elements.
So there is a new complexity that has to be comprehended
and mastered in this kind of design work. We can no longer entertain
simple minded ontological notions about how the world is constituted.
The world is relational rather than a world of objects with stable
properties. We have to comprehend the world as an integrated system,
not a collection of objects sorted into a classification or composed
into a static spatial arrangement. Within a network the identity of
any object or node is depending on the total patterns of relations
that it might enter into directly or even indirectly. And this implies
an ongoing process of transformation that can no longer be type-cast
into stable essences. We are moving from typology to topology and parametric
models. The very important point is that the object can only be identified
by its position in the network of relations. And this position is not
a primarily a spatial position. Rather objects become agents in networks
of collaboration. So their identity depends on their social role within
the society of system components. The human users might be conceptualised
as a certain subset of system components with a high degree of autonomy.
Agents also evolve historically. Memory functions can be introduced.
If this is becoming a generalised feature of our artificial world,
we can no longer describe the object without referring to the object
history, to its current position within its life cycle or developmental
trajectory. The object’s life process might involve a fixed stretch
of time or one dependent upon the history of interaction with other
objects etc. The possibilities seem infinite. Even an artificial evolution
might be instigated.
When you talk about mutation, perhaps, maybe we are
moving into a much more complex game. When developing such an interactive
system we could ,perhaps, distinguish a cyclical system which has a
series of interlinked events or chain reactions which always find back
to the initial condition. The object oscillates. It has a simple life
cycle. What we are starting to look into as well, and of course we
follow computer research into genetic algorithms and genetic programming
, is the possibility that the responsive interaction leaves traces.
We would like to develop the object, mutate the object, allowing the
object to evolve and gather experience. So it is not a prefigured life
cycle, but a kind of life development of each element. This is a fascinating
new aspect to think through we are trying to model small words where
objects as well as the system as a whole evolve. It is not a Newtonian
universe of cyclical stable systems, but a Darwinian universe of mutation,
selection, reproduction, development and evolution. It is a fascinating
challenge to take on, but it is also, perhaps a necessary and pertinent
way to think about architecture today given the fact that the social
life process is in continuous development. And these developments are
irreversible developments rather than cycles. So architecture might
be able to participate in this mechanism. The capacity for evolution
and development thus becomes a conscious design agenda from the very
outset.
End.
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