Systemic Architecture

Operating Manual for the Self-Organizing City

Marco Poletto, Claudia Pasquero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136336898
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This is a manual investigating the subject of urban ecology and systemic development from the perspective of architectural design. It sets out to explore two main goals: to discuss the contemporary relevance of a systemic practice to architectural design, and to share a toolbox of informational design protocols developed to describe the city as a territory of self-organization.

Collecting together nearly a decade of design experiments by the authors and their practice, ecoLogicStudio, the book discusses key disciplinary definitions such as ecologic urbanism, algorithmic architecture, bottom-up or tactical design, behavioural space and the boundary of the natural and the artificial realms within the city and architecture.

A new kind of "real-time world-city" is illustrated in the form of an operational design manual for the assemblage of proto-architectures, the incubation of proto-gardens and the coding of proto-interfaces. These prototypes of machinic architecture materialize as synthetic hybrids embedded with biological life (proto-gardens), computational power, behavioural responsiveness (cyber-gardens), spatial articulation (coMachines and fibrous structures), remote sensing (FUNclouds), and communication capabilities (Ecological Footprint Grotto).

Supporting the authors' own essays and projects are contributions from key innovators in contemporary architecture and urban design: Michael Batty, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Michael Weinstock and Patrik Schumacher.

eco-social frameworks

[b1:1.1]

Messina 2012: A Regional Proto-Garden

[b1:1.2]

Regimes of Slowness Caracas: operational Landscapes

eco-social landscapes

[b1:2.3]

The Systemic Favels: Design Algorithm for a Social Free-Zone in the Arabic Peninsula

[b1:2.4]

The World Dubai Marine Life Incubators

[b1]

Environments

Virtual Plots

1. One of the main conceptual as well as material components of the self-organizing city: virtual plots are the organizational units of the city, the measuring block of its spatial and temporal articulation. 2. The word “virtual” does not refer to a negation of the real urban plots or to a simulated version of their subdivision as in a form of virtual reality. Rather it describes an alternative model to represent the city, one that refers to the past and the present configuration of the city

as pregnant not only with possibilities which become real, but with virtualities which become actual. Unlike the former, which defines a process in which one urban structure out of a set of predefined plans acquires reality, the latter defines a process in which an open urban problem is solved in a variety of different ways, with actual forms emerging in the process of reaching a solution.

Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, New York: Zone Books, 1988, p. 97

The conceptual difference leads to a vision of the future that could be defined as “advanced determinism”, based on the nonlinear and circular causality of the feedback loop, where the effects of an action react back onto its causes. 3. Each virtual plot of the city becomes therefore a unit of urban problem solving, within which multiple actors and agents are able to self-organize, giving rise to novel local structures and prototypes. The form of these structures can vary greatly and locally, sometimes re-describing the existing plots while on other occasions operating within or across their boundaries.

Operational Fields

1. The representation of diagrammatic pre-urban structures developed in order to allow cross fertilization and loading of different types of informational field and urban stimuli within a coherent urban plan. 2. Such coherent spatialization of multiple stimuli is a precondition for the development of protocols for the occupation of new territories or the redevelopment of existing urban landscapes; within this operational framework ecologic feedback, participation and social self-organization become possible. In fact we shall argue that urban self-organization requires the definition of an operational medium that generates responses out of urban stimuli; it scans the landscape defining resolutions, scales, regimes of sensitivity, rhythms, and renders fields of material accumulation and informational exchange. 3. Operational fields require a diagrammatic kind of representation and given their machinic nature depend on the development of dedicated design mechanisms; associative and algorithmic modelling techniques are at the core of this diagrammatic urban machine.

The World Dubai Marine Life Incubators: model of artificial island formations

About …

The eco-social frameworks of this part of the book are two research projects unravelling the tight relationship existing between the ecology of the local landscape and the related social practices in Messina, in the Sicilian Stretto, and in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital city.

The projects have a strong analytical and methodological character and have been instrumental in setting the ground for the synthesis of new eco-social landscapes.

Both contexts are rich in social complexity and both present a particular case of ecologic stress or rupture between local residents and their own land; the consequences are suffered by the ecologic systems and the social groups alike, with pollution, landslides and desertification matched by poverty, violence and grief.

Following a systemic method of investigation of the site, the eco-social frameworks start by mapping the local topographic regions and related operational fields. An operational medium is produced, able to generate responses out of urban stimuli. Such a design device affords the architect a more comfortable and productive platform to breed his or her design arguments; through correlation of variables it is then possible to develop from a critical understanding of landscape processes to an engagement with the multiple related social conflicts. The resolution of ecologic tensions becomes therefore a strategic technique to resolve parallel social conflicts, thus setting the ground for processes of social reconnection to develop and self-regulate.

In Messina the framework extends to the entire region of the Stretto, to what has been named a Regional Proto-Garden. In Caracas the framework has more intimate connotations, involving a form of domestic operational landscape; a manual of landscape consolidation and phyto-depuration is passed on to the local community to empower the cultivation of this new domestic resource through a slow process of material and psychological remediation.

The intense experiences provided by these projects in such charged environments have proved important tests for the development of a method of urban ecologic design that could span scales and regimes and could be deployed in “tabula rasa” scenarios, where urban life is absent and architecture is asked to incubate urban life intensity. Examples of such scenarios exist on the outskirts of Dubai and Al Ain, UAE.

Here eco-social landscape projects operate as urban life incubators; the landscape itself provides the substratum for the incubation of living mechanisms able to generate a new abundance of sustainable resources and support interaction among new social groups.

The challenges posed by these two project scenarios are widespread and constitute a clear point of interest for the contemporary architect operating on a global scale. In Dubai the artificial World Lagoon was left unfinished by the financial crash, leaving desolation, marine ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Thoughts
• Discussions
• Environments [b1]
• Machines [b2]
• Behavioural Spaces [b3]
• Credits
• Index