Francois ROCHE of the Paris firm Sie(n) and a Professor at Columbia will be lecturing tomorrow evening, October 15^th at 6pm in the Higgins Hall auditorium.

Francois Roche is a French architect whose firm, R&Sie, is aptly pronounced “heresy.” Among his brainchildren is Dusty Relief, an edifice under construction in Bangkok which is surrounded by electrically charged wire that “grows fur” by statically attracting airborne filth. He has also conceived stealth habitats, hypothetical communities hidden from regulators and critics by vast sheets of camo netting. Architects are supposed to draw up plans, erect structures, and finish on time and under budget. Roche is exploring what happens when the usual constraints are allowed to fall away and things get wild and loose.

As a master of conceptual architecture, Roche likes to collaborate with installation artists. This tactic allows him to avoid hidebound European safety regulations when he proposes, for instance, a steel footbridge whose design, sketched using industry-standard CAD software, has been radically distorted by a computer virus. Ask Europeans to cross a buggy footbridge and they’ll balk, quail, and consult the 80,000 regulatory pages of the EU’s acquis communautaire. Tell them it’s art, and they’ll flock to it in droves, sit on it, and drink Beaujolais nouveau.

Roche’s latest project will appear in museums in Paris and Antwerp over the next three years. Titled I’ve Heard About Node 1, it’s as audacious as architecture’s peaks of weirdness in the ’60s; say, the Suitaloon, a combination garment and dwelling proposed by Michael Webb of the London hipster firm Archigram. And yet Roche’s scheme is not just fun to think about, but eerily plausible. He’s exploiting ideas that make perfect sense in computer-driven fabrication but have never been applied to architecture. Imagine a building where the needs and desires of its inhabitants are hot-wired to the shapes of walls and floors, which can be extended and updated ad hoc, ad infinitum.

That’s Node 1. It’s an idea for a building, yes, but it lacks most of the usual architectural accoutrements: blueprints, material suppliers, subcontractors. Instead, Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes.

A viab would produce structures that are not set and specific, but impermanent and malleable – merely viable – made of a uniform, recyclable substance like adobe. The automaton’s output would have no innate design, boundaries, or service life. It would take whatever form was called for at the moment – a great rotting blooming stony bubble of a building that, unlike all previous forms of human habitation, would be unplanned, responsive, densely monitored, massively customized, and rock-solid, with all modern conveniences.

The closest thing to a viab today is a small, modest mud-working robot invented by Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of engineering at the University of Southern California. Khoshnevis’ “contour crafter” works more or less like a 3-D printer, but it’s meant to assemble whole buildings. Its nozzle spits wet cement while a programmable trowel smoothes the goo into place. Roche encountered Khoshnevis, and his agile imagination immediately started pushing the idea toward its limits.

The concept isn’t as alien as it may seem; nature has been doing something similar for eons. Termites build skyscrapers by spitting and smoothing mud, then removing the structure if it gets in the way. A mound is shaped by the activity of the society within it. Roche imagines his viab as a busy termite with a body full of wet cement. It crawls ceaselessly across the structure, spewing new form and gnawing out old form, obeying an algorithm directly linked to the needs of the people inside.

It can also work without people entirely. The moon or Mars would be a natural venue for the concept, a place too hostile for mankind, where viabs could work around the clock: Let robots spit out a city, then settle in when it’s ready.

It might be a long time before a scheme this weird is realized. But suppose it is. Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” He was thinking about how nations evolve over generations, but in Node 1, those processes would play out once a week. The old brick-and-mortar rules would be gone, as though the crowded playa at Burning Man were to raise up mud castles rivaling the Transamerica Pyramid.

Do we need a capacity like that? It’s impossible to say, because the notion is genuinely heretical. It’s not every day that an age-old discipline like architecture coughs up an anomaly that’s unthinkable. This is one of those fine moments.

text via wired mag

image via Stephen Lyth 2006

“Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture”, Speaker: Manuel Delanda, Date: April 9, 2004, Art and Technology Lecture Series

Manuel De Landa, (born 1952 in Mexico City), is a writer, artist and philosopher who has lived in New York since 1975. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University (New York), the Gilles Deleuze Chair of Contemporary Philosophy and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, a lecturer at the Canisius College in Buffalo, New York, lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and adjunct professor at Pratt Institute the School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. He has a BFA from New York’s School of Visual Arts.

He is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991), A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997), Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2002) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2006). He has published many articles and essays and lectured extensively in Europe and in the United States. His work focuses on the theories of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze on one hand, and modern science, self-organizing matter, artificial life and intelligence, economics, architecture, chaos theory, history of science, nonlinear dynamics, cellular automata on the other. De Landa became a principal figure in the “new materialism” based on his application of Deleuze’s realist ontology. His universal research into “morphogenesis” – the production of the semi-stable structures out of material flows that are constitutive of the natural and social world – has been of interest to theorists across many academic and professional disciplines.

Based on the sinusoidal walls of Eladio Dieste, this study aims to analyze and compare the benefits gained by creating walls (and other structures) with varying degrees of sinusoidal profiles.

Background

The Church of Christ the Worker, located in Atlantida, Uraguay, was constructed between 1958 and 1960 from designs by architect/engineer Eladio Dieste.  The most striking feature of this church is the sinusoidal side walls — which are based on cosine waves mirrored across the center aisle, as shown in the schematic below.

Goal

The goal of this ongoing study is to create models based off of these sinusoidal walls and to compare them under a variety of loading scenarios.  Comparing models with varying degrees of “curviness” — which is mathematically controlled by increasing/decreasing the amplitude of the cosine waves — will provide insight into why Dieste would choose to use walls of this type.  Such double-curved designs recur in his works, and as an engineer, he informed these decisions based, at least in part, on the advantages that these shapes provided with respect to loading.

Description

I started this study by creating a small variety of shapes to “play around with” in SolidWorks.   Once I determined how I would proceed with the study, I went back and normalized all of the parameters so that valid comparisons could be drawn.  I first generated a surface by using two juxtaposed cosine waves as the top and bottom limits — the peaks of one cosine correlated with the troughs of the other, and vice-versa.  This surface was then thickened.  Six shapes were generated from this template — with cosine amplitudes of 0 (a flat, planar wall), 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5.  They are all 24 inches tall and slightly more than 25 inches wide (8 pi, to be exact, since each has a period of 2 pi repeated 4 times).

I then applied a fixed set of conditions using COSMOSWorks.  For each model, I applied three different sets of restraints and pressure loads, all with a fixed value of 10psi compression: (1) bottom fixed and loaded from the top, (2) bottom fixed and loaded from the sides, and (3) bottom fixed and loaded from the top and the sides.  For those familiar with the software, this is done with a basic static analysis, using PVC as the material.  Each design scenario produces five graphs: stress, strain, deformation, displacement, and factor of safety.  Due to the comparitive nature of these analyses, the graph of interest is that of the stress analysis.

As part of the ongoing study, with excellent feedback from several instructors and professionals, more loading scenarios will be included, including changing the restraints (i.e. “real life” wall restraints on all sides) and the directions of the pressure loads.  There will also be analyses of several more shapes based on Dieste’s designs, including those with simple extruded cosine profiles instead of juxtaposed ones, and with different materials.

Completed Analysis Images

As it exists now, there is already a fairly large set of images generated.  I caution you to note that the scale of each image is slightly different (”blue” on one graph is not necessarily equal to “blue” on another).  The usefulness of these graphs as images is that they provide insight into where the shapes experience the highest levels of stress — mechanically, these areas are where the structures are the weakest from a load-carrying perspective.  The basis of the comparison lies in looking at the maximum and minimum stress values for each iteration, which will be catalogued for comparison at a future date.

I will begin with the planar case, and work in increasing increments.  For all cases other than the planar one, I included screenshots of both sides of the models — because the shapes are based on cosines, there are more full peaks on one side than on the other, thus creating a “preference” for bending in that direction.  In each image, the green arrows indicate which portion is fixed, and the red arrows indicate on which face the pressure load is being applied.  Blue represents the lowest stress levels, green the intermediate stress levels, and red the highest stress levels, as per the scale on the right.  The scale is difficult to read at the required image resolution, but it varies for each model.

Iteration 1: Planar

Iteration 2: Amplitude of 0.5

Iteration 3: Amplitude of 1

Iteration 4: Amplitude of 1.5

Iteration 5: Amplitude of 2

Iteration 6: Amplitude of 2.5

A Short Note

You can already begin to see, just visually, the effect that adding curvature has on the stress distribution.  Rather than being evenly distributed throughout the body (as in the planar case), the curvature concentrates the stress in the central, neraly planar area of the body.  For example, under the third loading scenario (bottom fixed, pressure from the top and from the sides), the planar body experiences a max stress of 18.4 psi, whereas the most curved model (iteration 6) experiences a max stress of 347 psi under identical conditions.  The planar body has an average stress of 9.7 psi, whereas the curved body has an average stress of 62.3 psi.  However, the curved body also has more places wherein the stress is equal to or lower than that of the planar body, as confirmed by probe sampling of those areas.  Will planar surfaces hold up better than curved ones to loads on the largest faces?  Discovering these kinds of trade-offs are the end goal of these studies.

Study by Gerard Delatour II originally posted on core.form-ula and was produced under the guidance of Neil Katz + Ajmal Aqtash in the Stevens PAE Skyscraper Design Studio