A couple of days ago I added a new text to the ‘sources‘ section of my site: “Organics“, a short but very utopic text published by William Katavolos in 1961, including a few drawings of the world to come. He had a vision of a new kind of building technology, enabling houses to be built by mixing a few preprogrammed chemical components as if they were a cups of instant soup. He describes this vision wholly in terms of plastics, catalysts and blow-molded shapes, but I think his dreams are suddenly very relevant again in our time as we are told biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and modular robotics are almost there to invade and reshape our daily lives.

from ‘Organics’ by William Katavolos.

He writes:

“New discoveries in chemistry have led to the production of powdered and liquid materials which when suitably treated with certain activating agents expand to great size and then catalize and become rigid. We are rapidly gaining the necessary knowledge of the molecular structure of these chemicals, together with the necessary techniques that will lead to the production of materials which will have a specific program of behavior built into them, while still in the submicroscopic stage. Accordingly it will be possible to take minute quantities of powder and make them expand into predetermined shapes such as spheres, tubes and toruses.”

and I especially like how the text ends:

“Houses such as this would grow to certain sizes, sub-divide or fuse for larger functions. Great vaults would be produced with parabolic jets that catalize on contact with the air. Exploding patterns of an instantaneous architecture of transformations, into desired densities, into known directions, for calculated durations.
In the morning suburbs might come together to create cities, and at night move like music to other moorings for cultural needs or to produce the socio-political patterns that the new life demands.”

A dreamer of a competely different caliber is John M. Johansen, an accomplished architect with a very interesting and varied building career. One of the most interesting of the many buildings he designed is the Stage Center (1965-1970) in Oklahoma (see here too), apparently influenced by the beauty of electronics boards with their components and circuits. Currently aged 91, he has in the past thirty years or so devoted himself to developing futurist architectural scenarios, speculating about new building techniques and the new types of building they could make possible. His book ‘Nanoarchitecture’ is a collection of ten proposals that all breathe a friendly spirit of humanist optimism. For most of these proposals he makes threedimensional models, often from plastic bottles and other recycled household materials, which makes the leap into the future even more charming and imaginative. Recently he founded ONA: Office for Nanoarchitecture, which seems to focus on the direction introduced by the later proposals in his book. These describe blueprints for buildings in the form of specially nanoengineered seeds, which are planted in the soil, fed the right materials, and which then grow into houses and other building types. A version of the Katavolos dream, but informed by new technologies. (and he actually refers to Katavolos, too)

The Multistory Apartment House by John M. Johansen/ONA.

On this subject there is a classic book which I recently discovered: “An Evolutionary Architecture” by John Frazer, published as an accompaniment of an exhibition in 1995. This is one of the most amazing books I’ve ever come across and I’ll certainly come back to it in future postings. It is one of these rare books which are the condensation of a whole career of highly original research and which seem to explode from the sheer number of ideas in them. So yes, I’m enthousiastic about it, and even though the book is available online, I desperately need a hardcopy of it (which is impossible to find right now, but I’ll be patient).

In his introduction cybernetics holy man Gordon Pask writes: “The role of the architect here, I think, is not so much to design a building or city as to catalyse them; to act that they may evolve. That is the secret of the great architect. To a large extent this principle has been uncovered or at least assisted by the work reported in this book. The principle exhibited has particular contemporary relevance as society and the environment, a fortiori the built environment, become ever more dependent upon meaningful information transfer. If you accept that this information environment is becoming of increasing significance, then you must admire this work.”

And John Frazer starts the book with these words: “Architecture is considered as a form of artificial life, subject, like the natural world, to principles of morphogenesis, genetic coding, replication and selection. The aim of an evolutionary architecture is to achieve in the built environment the symbiotic behaviour and metabolic balance that are characteristic of the natural environment.”

Below some pictures related to the ‘Universal Constructor’, which is one of the many projects discussed in the book.

Gordon Pask with the Universal Constructor as exhibited in 1990.

Here an early precursor of the ‘Universal Constructor’, from 1980. These cubes can learn about their configuration: “Each cube in turn examines each of its faces, and if another cube is found a message is sent back and control is transferred from cube to adjacent cube until an exhaustive search is completed.”

About a later precursor: “This meant that it was possible to build an architectural model with toy bricks and to interrogate it by means of a controlling processor: the result was a virtual model from which complete drawings, perspectives and calculations could be produced.”

“I am not interested in the argument about whether computers are actually intelligent, alive or conscious, but as a mental exercise it it interesting to consider a building to be conscious at least in the sense of being able to anticipate the implications of its actions, as any good environmental control system should be able to do.”

the ‘Universal Constructor’.

“Each cell had an identifying state and was capable of displaying any other state. Messages could be passed between any two units by streaming data in serial form down one stack of cells and up another. The flow of logic in the model was thus made visible by slowing down the system. The array could be used as an input or output device. For input, the exact configuration, location and identifying code of every cell could be deduced by a controlling processor interrogaing each location and prompting for a possible neighbour above. As an output device, each cell could display 256 messages with the eight LEDs. interaction with the observer was made possible by two red LEDs – one flashing light meant ‘take me away’; two flashing lights meant ‘add a cube on top’.”

from 1990, mind you !

A very recent book I read which covers at least some of the same territory is the current issue of the VERB boogazine published by Actar, called ‘Natures‘. We-make-money-not-art has a nice review of it. The book discusses about 25 projects, of which I will mention two.
I especially liked the ‘Algorithmic Space’ wooded bungalow project by Shohei Matsukawa / 000studio. They show a very inspiring making-of-a-prototype fotoseries in the book: It reminds us what a great idea, a flash script, two guys and many bits of wood can do.

A very similar but much more famous project is the Beijing Water Cube building: here no wood but steel and plastic, and not two but seemingly infinitely many clever guys with money to spend. An amazing structure, based on what is called the Weaire and Phelan-structure of foam, an irregular structure which consists of only two building blocks (see an article from The Guardian and some flashy images of the designs).

In fact the boogazine as a whole is not so much about nature-as-we-know-it as about the impact of new ‘mass-customizable’ construction methods which enable a much more algorithmic, generative way of building structures. Hence the emphasis on the types of structure as mentioned above; structures which are sometimes indeed often inspired by nature, but which can also be similar because they are convergent solutions to similar problems.

In ‘Natures’ there are three more theoretical texts which underping the approach chosen in the selection of projects.

First is a great text called ‘Atmosphere, Material of the Digital Gardener’ by Cristina Diaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda. two quotes, one towards the beginning:
“First we need to cease our insistence of a duality in nature: dominating and pillaging its resources while at the same time making it the repository of an idyllic redemptive capacity to cure all the ills of civilization; mecilessly exploiting it while letting ourselves be apathetically fascinated by its beauty. Bad news for the naive: that kind of nature no longer exists. We are surrounded by another nature, made up of fragments of deserted landscape, natural parks, agricultural expanses, contaminated lands, vast magma-like cities, transportation infrastructures… A mosaic of different natures, some maintained in their original state by means of overprotection, others irreversibly polluted and altered. In reality, that other nature in many different natures, a whole ocean of multi-natures around which a new beauty has been elaborated, a beauty intrinsic to it that has nothing to do with the idyll, which the Modernists considered as the redemption for big city evils.”
and one towards the end of the text:
“We might ask ourselves what would happen if we were to introduce, into our artificial landscape, a whole series of succession and natural growth laws in conjunction with geometries and rules to generate artificial environments. Welcome to an infrastructural city of natural qualities, artificial material landscapes, evolved and cultivated as if they were living organisms that have assumed the role of what was called architecture.”

Second is a text by Kas Oosterhuis called ‘Swarm Architecture II’ which is something between a manifesto and an overview of the many recent projects developed by his ONL bureau and the Hyperbody research group he founded. I find many of his ideas very interesting, but his use of terms like swarms is metaphoric at the least and when he starts using quantum-related terms it becomes downright embarrassing. But at the hyperbody institute they’re doing some great experiments with transformable shapes in responsive setups.

The third theoretical text is called ‘Research on the Biocapitalist Landscape’, by Philippe Morel. It is a very thorough study of the developments to come in the forest industry, as a case study of our changing relationship to nature. The accompanying interview with Morel ends with a very deep quote by Wittgenstein:

“The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem” (Tractatus 6.521)

After this, what is there left to say on this topic ?