Tuesday, August 31, 2004

september 2004 research review speech

This study started with an axiom that architecture is about complex system because the problem of architecture is complex in nature.

Architecture and complexity is not a new topic in architectural research; Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks had philosophised about this.

But only because at this time, the study of complex things has become more common and I feel the necessity to re-inquire architecture and complexity in the light of the current knowledge of complexity.

CECA’s guideline in approaching the problem of complexity in architecture is about the underlying mechanism on the creation of form. Architecture in complex term is all about the process. That’s why the center has focused in the development of synthetic models of system that show some aspects regulating the creation of form. This practice is exactly what practicing researchers in the field of complexity do, building programs to test theories based on the observation on the dynamic synthetic model simulations.

My interest is on the aspect of occupation in the creation of form as according to the configurational theory of architecture. The importance of configurational theory of architecture is in providing a paradigm that shows the possibility to inquire the complexity of architecture.

The paradigm is:
configuration of space influence and can be influenced by configuration of people

Thus the theory provides us with significant elements to build synthetic models of occupation; and most importantly it provides the set of relations between spaces in the system of space.

The configurational theory does not provide the elements and set of relations of synthetic model of people's configuration, thus i found the source in multi-agent system theory where the behaviour of collection of agents can be model in simple and most basic term.

I've presented a poster paper of the on going research at the DCC, July 2004 at the MIT and have been invited to submit a paper on the continuation of the work.

So far, the synthetic model has been partially built. The problem now is to identify and lay out the mechanism that connects the two systems (system of space and people). This could generally called a feedback mechanism, but i prefer to name it spatial languaging mechanism because embedded within it a specific coordination (languaging as devised by Maturana) mechanism that happens only in space.

The research has identified couple of foundings;
1. The voronoi algorithm which use in representing the spatial system is originally a grand method to divide a blank, boundaryless space; needs a mechanism to distribute the process of divisioning the space evenly. One way to do this is to identify the boundary of space, as in to acknowledge the site boundary in the real site planning project. This has been found unintentionally by one of Master's student.
2.