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negotiations of the emergent field

Part 2 Project 2003
Roland Snooks
Sarah Mathieson
 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology | Australia
The project acts as an exploration of emergence, concerned with the
interaction of localised entities, or agents, and the behavior they
demonstrate in generating patterns of overall form. The generation of form
is proposed as a negotiation between fields of information and the actions
of architectural elements seeded with behavioral desires. Operating on the
modernist plaza surrounding Nauru House [Melbourne CBD], the project
reassesses the rigid relationship of plaza and program, creating instead a
contiguous, smooth but differentiated weave of program, plaza and event. The
project attempts to develop an emergent form of urban space, critiquing a
modernist object ground relationship, instead viewing the urban condition as
a gradient field of influence.


In this exemplary project, Roland Snooks used agent based software to
describe programmatic relationships as emerging from a complex system of
interactions. In distinction to the extreme abstractions architects
often use to describe program and activities within buildings, here
agents model complex behaviours of large systems by assigning many
individual desires and modes of interaction. Program is thought of as a
potential field that enables traversing agents to become specific parts
of the architecture. By linking building elements (facade, construction
grid etc) to the agents, a truly interactive system results, where the
building fabric responds to emergent particularities of program, which
in turn conditions the limits of what can occur within the building.
This foremost concern for rethinking architectural relationships in
light of digitally enabled methods establishes this project as of the
highest standard.
Tutor(s)
Dr Alexandra Stara
2003
contiguous weave of plaza
operations on the existing plaza and tower block
view within plaza
emergent urban space
responsive facade, suggesting inhabitation
view to plaza
emergent self-organisation, agent based programmatic distribution
programmatic swarm, agent based programmatic distribution
reflexive grid, construction grid reacts behaviourally to programmatic swarm [attractors]
reflexive grid, behavioural animation sequence
behavioural agents, urban trajectories
behavioural agents, response to event attractors
agent based surface generation
weave of public surface and program
section, complex interaction of multilayered plaza weave
reflexive surface, negotiation of form between behavioural surface and urban trajectories
reflexive facade, negotiation of form between behavioural surface and field of attractors
surface patterning, intersection of programmatic cloud and public surface
surface articulation, behavioural simulation density capture
negotiations of the emergent field
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