PROCESSING ENVIRONMENTS SYMPOSIUM / GUGGENHEIM
MUSEUM BILBAO
The growing consciousness that a building is a
device that performs primarily as an environmental regulator is shifting the
focus of the discipline from tectonics to social and ecological processes:
buildings establish the regime of energy exchange of the built environment by
virtue of their geometry, their materiality etc… and therefore there is an
opportunity to establish relationships between these performances and emerging
architectural sensibilities and expressions.
Within these lines, the symposium will embrace
and extended notion of environment by looking at the work of international
architects, artists as well as research directors of recognised international
institutions. Moreover, the symposium will tease out speculative directions for
architecture that move beyond reductive approaches to ecology, as in “green”
notions. The discussion will aim to bring together the work of practitioners
and researchers to unveil novel and alternative methods of engaging,
interacting and perceiving the environment from social, ecological and material
perspectives.
Symposium participants:
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
introduction
Bilbao Town Hall introduction
Inaki Begiristain ETSASS
Eva Castro
+ Alfredo Ramirez (Groundlab)
Cristina Díaz Moreno + Efrén García Grinda
Juan
Herreros
Toni Kotnik
Gramazio & Kohler
Marjetica Potrc (Guggenheim Guest)
Philippe
Rahm (Institut Francais Guest)
Douglas Spencer
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
COMPUTING TOPOS WORKSHOP / ALHONDIGA BILBAO
BRIEF
The workshop will explore the question of
‘place’ or ‘topos’ and its radical transformation in the recent years due to
the proliferation and availability of environmental parameters. Departing from
the notion of ‘computing,’ understood as information processing, strategies of
‘data mining’ and ‘indexing’ will be proposed as sensible readings of the site
and the territory.
The workshop aims at bringing together design
strategies and the critical utilization of both local and global, material and
virtual, visible and invisible information of the place. To build upon new
operational platforms of environmental readings, the proposals will work on the
diagram and the indexing, as opposed to dissociated parametric strategies.
Sites will be chosen from residual areas in
complex topographies generated by the insertion of massive infrastructural
tissues in the territory. Many have referred to these places as by-product of
the era of globalization, and as a result they have often appeared coupled with
new constructions that have been virally spread accross the territory in the
last 40 years or so. These spaces that are neither private nor public but ‘common’
are identified as potentially interesting to engage with the contemporary urban
ecologies. Departing from this ‘generic’ typological condition and by
integrating ‘extended’ environmental data obtained from the specificities of
the site will build towards the notion of:
TOPOS- Place
The breeding of local environmental parameters
will generate new forms of architectural agency and expression. Diverse
mechanisms will be used to materialize ‘invisible’ information such as
environmental and social conditions, users’ preferences, digital information,
etc. The capture of ‘local’ data will be done through the use of sensors, site
specific simulations and rss feeds which will be used to capture information in
the ‘network’. The workshop will provide the students with technical support to
use microprocessors and sensing technologies. Each team will be looking at one
main environmental parameter, in its broader sense, such as sun light,
programmatic densification, urban flux, users’ data collected from urban behavioural
patterns, potential energetic consumption/production, etc to synthesize ‘Datascapes’
that will feed into the projects. These ‘Datascapes’ will be built from
the following devices, software and strategies:
Sensors > Arduino
Data mining >
Processing
Indexing- Rhinoceros (Plug in: Grasshopper)
Environmental
simulations: Maya/ Land desktop/ Ansys / Ecotech
The students will be given different sites for
each team to look at a relevant site-specific variable. These variables will
intertwine with a common programmatic allocation: productive spaces. The
material translation of these data will frame the question of COMPUTING through
the localization of global ‘types’:
COMPUTING- Processing data
The outcome will be a result of the
site-specific programmatic and volumetric architectural proposal. For instance,
the team that will be looking at the parameter of density will explore vertical
developments to maximize the productivity of the site; the team that is looking
at the sun light parameter will be looking at an architectural expression that
tries to maximize solar exposure.
Rhinoceros- (Plug ins:
Grasshoper, Grasshoper vb script, Kangaroo, Galapagos, etc)
Digital fabrication techniques (3D printing,
CNC, lasercutting, robotic constructions, etc)
EXERCISES- Scope of the projects to be
developed in the workshop
The exercises will be developed at the
following landscape scales:
A > Productive
Landscape_ Design process fed by environmental and inhabitants’ parameters.
B >
Landscape components_ Automated Fabrication process design fed by environmental
and inhabitants’ parameters.
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