SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies Author: Yu Nong Khew

Artificial Intelligence: Parametric Urban Spread

"Architecture is intellectually, methodologically and materially connected to other fields in ways never before imaginable. It is becoming a less pure and more composite discipline. Architectural processes are thus constitutionally affected by logics traditionally defined as lying outside the field...... Architecture is systemically already linked to city and industry. On a macro-scale a chimerical logic binds architecture into cultural, commercial and industrial ecology. It considers architecture in terms of product systems and related processes. Viewed in this way architecture is but one system organically interconnected with many others such as artificial object-systems and infrastructures as well as natural ecosystems. With the increasing sophistication of emergent software and emergent materials it is possible to design cities, processes and architecture that together exhibit the qualities and behavior of naturalized systems."1

Conventional urban design methods often lead to the traditional methods of master planning using systemic layering and constitutional infrastructural planning. On the contrary, this project makes use of modern Artificial Intelligence software such as a plug-in in Maya, Brainbugz, and particle dynamics, which mimic insect behavioral movements. Instead of conventional master planning, which is a nondebatable, top-down and rigid strategy, the studio is proposing a more robust, less top-down controlled and more self-organizational design strategy. Conventional master planning involves the extraction of complex urban built-up into isolated layers of categories. Also, by falsely assuming that systems operate the same way in isolation as they do in aggregation, the conventional method of master planning typically fails to recognize networks in complicated systems. In the layered method, connectivity is viewed as linkage, not as constitutional. The approach installs individual urban systems not in layers but as massive crowds of intelligent agents, i.e. Brainbugz. "Each group corresponding to an urban system has its own identity which is embedded as parametric behavior.

Intelligence translates as simple decision-making capacity in relation to other groups or environmental conditions. In this way complex urban heterogeneity is managed without having to fall back on reductivist methods. The resulting organizational patterns are harvested as abstract blueprints for design." 2

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Proto MUTEN Network, Sulan Kolatan, Kolatan Studio Fall 2008 Proto MUTEN Design Methods, Sulan Kolatan, Kolatan Studio Fall 2008

Artificial Intelligence: Parametric Urban Spread

SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies Author: Yu Nong Khew

The third master planning concept addresses the temporality of urban design, expressed in phases. The main problem with this approach is that it is not adaptive in nature. This poses a huge problem for the life expectancy of a master plan as master plan phases are generally medium to long-term, meaning that altered conditions falling between the start- and end-time of the designs implementation will lead to obsoleteness even as the design is still in progress. On the contrary, this method is dynamic. This is because the self-organizational nature of urban entities (as intelligent agents) evolves within controlled time intervals. Parametric adaptation and emergence are two qualities of these kinds of "spatial organizations that are a function of time-based methods involving memory and learning. Urban agents remember and thereby learn and change their behavior over time. Finally, the method allows for the simulation of life cycle processes in urban design. Viability of particular urban systems (as intelligent agents) is contingent on the circumstances (as represented in other agent groups or environmental conditions) that support or weaken it. As the method shifts from layering to networked-ness, the project generates the continual selforganization of emergent systems consisting of heterogeneous agent groups into contingent and temporal associations and hybrid organizations (formal and otherwise). These formations are interrelated as fuzzy sets with situational and open-ended associations between these evolving hybrid classes. Coupled with the rethinking of spatiality there is a re-conception of temporality here.

Linear time concepts -implying obsolescence- are replaced with notions of feedback and looping - implying renewal. We already see the application of these concepts in industrial ecology through the advance from cradle-to-grave to cradle-to-cradle models."3

In the master planning of this project, the studio attempted to redefine the industrial belt of the upper area of the Golden Horn, by virtue of a wetlands park coupled with a bazaar that would survive through the river as the main vein for transportation. The whole idea of wetlands with the existence of a bazaar is due to a large number of reasons. Firstly, just by looking up a Google earth aerial view of the site shows that the entire area is a single patch defined by large scale single purpose structures, hard edges and impermeable surfaces. According to what one knows from urban
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MUTEN Design Methods, Sulan Kolatan, Kolatan Studio Fall 2008

Artificial Intelligence: Parametric Urban Spread

SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies Author: Yu Nong Khew

ecology about patch dynamics, this is a worst case scenario. In patches with these characteristics, environmental pathologies multiply. As such, introducing wetlands to this area not only reduces the damages to the existing area, but also starts to reverse engineer a new sustainability into this space. The bazaar is known to all that it has a consumer-related business. As such, it will tie in hand in hand with the wetlands to be introduced to the site. In urban sustainability, this creates a cycle of inletoutlet-inlet possibility, meaning that the bazaar will create refuse and the wetlands, clean up and refeed into this system of in and outs. The city now has a cleansing mechanism, (wetlands) coupled with a feeding mechanism. (bazaar) This is hoped that the cycle of taking waste from the existing site and breaking them down into fertilizers for the flowers that will go into the flower market within the bazaar starts to paint a picture of continuity, and not one that belongs to the conventional master planning era, where often many existing programs do not get to play a role in connecting with new programs introduced into the area. In the research project, there was the attempt to redefine the scale of a conventional bazaar using the Artificial Intelligence software mentioned previously. Conventional large scale bazaars are often planned in an extremely hierarchical manner, such that entrances, plazas, shops and open spaces are seen as nodal points, (Image of a City by Kevin Lynch) instead of the city being an urban continuum. In this project, the existing typologies of bazaars in Istanbul were taken apart and studies were made on these "dissected typologies" as smaller scaled modules that would ultimately contribute to the urban built-up of the city. Applying the most basic existing form of the dome in a bazaar, one created many different possibilities of a single cell of a bazaar and arrayed these different cells across the topology of the existing site. This topology has been also redefined in terms of mapping methods, such that instead of using contours, one used voronoi cells previously attained from the insect behavior of the Brainbugz software. As the city changes in demands for another program, the parametric dome cell begins to morph and change in shape and scale according to the accurate calculations of the area of each voronoi cell, allowing for a dynamic interrelationship from the change in scale of a bazaar shop, to that of an office tower. Using the same rules of creating the bazaar cell, one then changed its parameters such that the form of the cell now becomes suitable for application to the voronoi areas designated as wetlands cells and water cells. The alteration and codifying of these cells all cross-reference back to the original Artificial Intelligence: Parametric Urban Spread

SCI-Arc Fall 2008 Cultural Studies Author: Yu Nong Khew

typologies of such existing programs found in today's world, only planned vastly different in terms of hierarchical and topological factors. Instead of defining in a blueprint where a building will stand, this project looks at what a program needs in its simplest form, and propagates the various cells across a newly defined topological map. Although keeping the formal ideas of the existing programs, by changing the idea that a plan is one that is drawn from knowing the site boundaries, one managed to come up with something that is typologically different and varied. The city is now connected in multiple layers and bunches, instead of being dependent on nodes, vistas, pathways, boundaries and disconnects.

Artificial Intelligence: Parametric Urban Spread