LabStudio

Design Research between Architecture and Biology

Jenny Sabin, Peter Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317666363
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Berufspraxis in der Architektur

LabStudio: Design Research between Architecture and Biology introduces the concept of the research design laboratory in which funded research and trans-disciplinary participants achieve radical advances in science, design, and applied architectural practice. The book demonstrates to natural scientists and architects alike new approaches to more traditional design studio and hypothesis-led research that are complementary, iterative, experimental, and reciprocal. These originate from 3-D spatial biology and generative design in architecture, creating philosophies and practices that are high-risk, non-linear, and design-driven for often surprising results.Authors Jenny E. Sabin, an architectural designer, and Peter Lloyd Jones, a spatial biologist, present case studies, prototypes, and exercises from their practice, LabStudio, illustrating in hundreds of color images a new model for seemingly unrelated, open-ended, data-, systems- and technology-driven methods that you can adopt for incredible results.

PART I
Design Research in Practice

Methodology and Approach with Historical Precedents and Case Studies

1
Bioconstructivisms¹

Detlef Mertins

On meeting the German structural engineer Frei Otto in 1997, Lars Spuybroek was struck by the extent to which Otto’s approach to the design of light structures was resonant with his own interest in the generation of complex and dynamic curvatures. Having designed the Freshwater Pavilion (1994–1997) through geometric and topological procedures, which were then materialised through a steel structure and flexible metal sheeting, Spuybroek found in Otto a reservoir of experiments in developing curved surfaces of even greater complexity through a process that was already material – that was, in fact, simultaneously material, structural and geometric. Moreover, Otto’s concern with flexible surfaces not only blurred the classic distinctions between surface and support, vault and beam (suggesting a non-elemental conception of structural functions) but made construction and structure a function of movement, or more precisely a function of the rigidification of soft, dynamic entities into calcified structures such as bones and shells. Philosophically inclined toward a dynamic conception of the universe – a Bergsonian and Deleuzian ontology of movement, time and duration – Spuybroek embarked on an intensive study of Otto’s work and took up his analogical design method. A materialist of the first order, Spuybroek now developed his own experiments following those of Otto with soap bubbles, chain nets and other materials as a way to discover how complex structural behaviours find forms on their own accord, which can then be reiterated on a larger scale using tensile, cable or shell constructions.

This curious encounter between Spuybroek and Otto sends us back not only to the 1960s but deeper in time. The recent re-engagement of architecture with generative models from nature, science and technology is itself part of a longer history of architects, engineers and theorists pursuing autopoiesis or self-generation. While its procedures and forms have varied, self-generation has been a consistent goal in architecture for over a century, set against the perpetuation of predetermined forms and norms. The well-known polemic of the early twentieth-century avant-garde against received styles or compositional systems in art and architecture – and against style per se – may, in fact, be understood as part of a longer and larger shift in thought from notions of predetermination to self-generation, from transcendence to immanence. The search for new methods of design has been integral to this shift, whether it be figured in terms of a period-setting revolution or the immanent production of multiplicity. Although a history of generative architecture has yet to be written, various partial histories in art, philosophy and science may serve to open this field of research.

In his landmark cross-disciplinary study, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy and Literature around 1800 (1997), Helmut Müller-Sievers describes how the Aristotelian doctrine of the epigenesis of organisms – having been challenged in the seventeenth century by the rise of modern sciences – resurfaced in the eighteenth century, as the mechanistic theories of Galileo, Descartes and Newton floundered in their explanations of the appearance of new organisms. Whereas figures such as Charles Bonnet and Albrecht von Haller held that the germs of all living beings had been pre-formed since the Creation – denying nature any productive energy – a new theory of self-generation gradually took shape. An active inner principle was first proffered by Count Buffon and then elaborated by Caspar Friedrich Wolff, explaining the production of new organisms through the capacity of unorganised, fluid material to consolidate itself. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach transformed Wolff’s ‘essential force’ into a ‘formative drive’ that served as the motive for the successive self-organisation of life forms, understanding this as a transition from unorganised matter to organised corporations.²

The biological theory of epigenesis came to underpin the theory of autonomy in the human sphere – in art, aesthetics, philosophy, politics and social institutions such as marriage. As Müller-Sievers has noted, Blumenbach’s epigenesis provided a direct model for Kant’s deduction of the categories, on which his shift from metaphysics to epistemology relied: ‘Only if they are self-produced can the categories guarantee transcendental apriority and, by implication, cognitive necessity and universality.’³

In a similar vein, but looking to mathematics and its influence rather than biology or aesthetics, the philosopher David Lachterman characterised the whole of modernity as ‘constructivist’ and traced its origins further back to the shift in the seventeenth century from ancient to modern mathematics. Where the mathematics of Euclid focused on axiomatic methods of geometric demonstration and the proof of theorems (existence of beings), modern mathematics emphasised geometrical construction and problem-solving.⁴ As Lachterman put it, a fairly direct line runs from the ‘construction of a problem in Descartes through the ‘construction of an equation in Leibniz to the ‘construction of a concept’ in Kant.

Rather than reiterating ontologies of sameness, modern mathematics sought to produce difference through new constructions. In this regard it is telling that, as Lachterman points out, Euclidean geometry arose against a platonic backdrop which understood each of the mathematicals as having unlimited manyness. According to the doctrine of intermediates, ‘the mathematicals differ from the forms inasmuch as there are many ‘similar’ [homoia] squares, say, while there is only one unique form’. Lachterman continues:

The manyness intrinsic to each ‘kind’ of figure as well as the manyness displayed by the infinitely various images of each kind must somehow be a multiplicity indifferent to itself, a manyness of differences that make no fundamental difference, while nonetheless never collapsing into indiscriminate sameness or identity with one another.⁵

A Euclidean construction, then, does not produce heterogeneity, but rather negotiates an intricate mutuality between manyness and kinship, variation and stability. It is always an image of this one, uniquely determinate, specimen of the kind. ‘There is no one perfect square, but every square has to be perfect of its kind, not sui generis.’⁶ The quest for autopoiesis has been expressed, then, in a variety of oppositional tropes – creation versus imitation, symbol versus rhetoric, organism versus mechanism, epigenesis versus pre-formation, autonomy versus metaphysics and construction sui generis versus reiteration of Forms. In the nineteenth century, such binary oppositions came to underpin the quest for freedom among the cultural avant-garde. In his Five Faces of Modernity (1987), Matei Calinescu recounted that the term ‘avant-garde’ was first introduced in military discourse during the Middle Ages to refer to an advance guard. It was given its first figurative meaning in the Renaissance, but only became a metaphor for a self-consciously advanced position in politics, literature and art during the nineteenth century. In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire was the first to point to the unresolved tension within the avant-garde between radical artistic freedom and programmatic political campaigns modelled on war and striving to install a new order – between critique, negation and destruction, on the one hand, and dogma, regulation and system, on the other. An alternative interpretation of what Calinescu calls the aporia of the avant-garde – one that sharpens the implications of this problematic, both philosophically and politically – is suggested by Michael Hardt and Tony Negri’s account of the origins of modernity in their book, Empire (2000). Their history is even more sweeping than those reviewed above, summarising how, in Europe between 1200 and 1400, divine and transcendental authority over worldly affairs came to be challenged by affirmations of the powers of this world, which they call `the [revolutionary] discovery of the plane of immanence. Citing further evidence in the writings of Nicholas of Cusa among others, Hardt and Negri conclude that the primary event of modernity was constituted by shifting knowledge from the transcendental plane to the immanent, thereby turning knowledge into a doing, a practice of transforming nature. Galileo Galilei went so far as to suggest that it was possible for humanity to equal divine knowledge (and hence divine doing), referring specifically to the mathematical sciences of geometry and arithmetic. As Lachterman suggested using somewhat different terms, on the plane of immanence, mathematics begins to operate differently than it does within philosophies of transcendence where it secures the higher order of being. On the plane of immanence, mathematics is done constructively, solving problems and generating new entities. For Hardt and Negri, ‘The powers of creation that had previously been consigned exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth.’

By the time of Spinoza, Hardt and Negri note, the horizon of immanence and the horizon of democratic political order had come together, bringing the politics of immanence to the fore as both the multitude, in theoretical terms, and a new democratic conception of liberation and of law through the assembly of citizens.⁷ The historical process of subjectivisation launched an immanent constitutive power and with it a politics of difference and multiplicity. This in turn sparked counterrevolutions, marking the subsequent history as ‘an uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order’.⁸ For Hardt and Negri, this crisis is constitutive of modernity itself. Just as immanence is never achieved, so the counter-revolution is also never assured.

The conflict between immanence and transcendence may also be discerned in architecture, along with efforts to resolve it through the mediation of an architectonic system for free expression or self-generation. Critical of using historical styles, which were understood as residual transcendent authorities no longer commensurate with the present, progressive architects of the early twentieth century sought to develop a modern style that, in itself, would also avoid the problem of predetermination, which had taken on new urgency under the conditions of industrialisation and mass production. Such a style was conceived more in terms of procedures than formal idioms. For instance, in a piece of history that has received inadequate attention, a number of Dutch architects around 1900 turned to proportional and geometric constructions as generative tools. Recognising that classical, but also medieval and even Egyptian, architecture employed proportional systems and geometric schema, they hoped to discover a mathesis universalis, both timely and timeless, for a process of design whose results were not already determined at the outset. The validity and value of such forms were guaranteed, it was thought, by virtue of the laws of geometry, whose own authority was in turn guaranteed by their giveness in nature. Foremost among a group that included J.H. de Groot, K.P.C. de Bazel, P.J.H. Cuypers and J.L.M. Lauweriks, was H.P. Berlage, whose celebrated Stock Exchange in Amsterdam (1901) was based on the Egyptian triangle.

In lectures and publications of around 1907 – synopse...