Toward a Theory of Architecture Machines

Abstract

The fall 2009 option design studio at MIT—Ferry Slip Mashup—was the site of a pedagogical experiment in engaging the vast historical archive of disciplinary knowledge for the purposes of designing a ferry terminal on the Maine State Pier in Portland, Maine. While the first premise of the studio was that we needed to relearn how to think historically, its second premise was that we had to find an appropriately contemporary way to do that. And if the first premise pointed us to engaging the issue of precedent head on, the second ensured for our precedents the status of entries in a vast archive of architectural knowledge.     

Book Reviews

When design and technology are too widely separated in the architectural curriculum, the informing knowledge of technology is not engaged as a design issue. As an outcast to the creative design process, architectural technology itself becomes outmoded: It is not thought about and developed as a partner to the expression of architecture. Design becomes disengaged from the means of making architecture and disconnected from the world and its informing environmental insights.

Lack of knowledge of technology and environment is evident in the negative and in some cases disastrous impact of buildings—some held up as design exemplars—on both the natural and human environment. To bridge the gaps that exist in the architectural curriculum, educators must establish sustaining linkages between design inspiration and technological and environmental knowledge. Technology here does not mean the mechanistic icons and artifacts of current construction techniques. It is best defined as knowledge gained in the making, the accumulated insights into architecture learned from the experience of its processes and its place. If there is agreement on this conception, only modest changes are needed to integrate design, technology, and environment throughout the curriculum.     

Crafting the archive: Minnette De Silva,Architecture, and History

This article is about the work of Minnette De Silva, which made claims upon heritage and historical meaning through its concerns with craft. It investigates three facets of her oeuvre—her building, her writing and teaching, her design and handicraft—through the lens of her pictorial autobiography, The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect. She identified this remarkable publication as her ‘archives’, documenting in it her life and work (in the absence of a dedicated collection of records), and the equally notable twentieth-century sites and spheres through which she moved. Few careers invite critical investigation of South Asia's modern architectural forms and history as does that of De Silva, an understudied figure credited as a pioneer: a Sri Lanka Institute of Architects Gold Medal recipient, a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Associate, a co-founder of the journal MARG, a participant in the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), and an architect practising in a range of discursive media. This article argues that De Silva positioned her intellectual and practical labour as a basis for authority rooted in a situated knowledge. In a reading of gender, caste, race and labour that maintains a scholarly scepticism about the purpose of the artist's biography, this article recovers her life and work from a fragmented archive, including an interview with De Silva in the year before her death, as well as a consideration of craft—interrogating each vis-à-vis the politics of historiography.     

The Lure of the Sirens' Song: Part 1, First Thoughts on Process

Abstract

The nature and constituent activities of the so-called design process have been a frequent subject of discussion and speculation since the early sixties. Usually conducted under the formal rubric of design methods or, more recently, artificial intelligence or expert systems, several generations of assertions and models have found currency within the disciplines of architecture, engineering, and design. Yet despite the extent of the literature available—from the so-called first-generation design methods represented by such early works as Asimow, Thornley, Jones, and Archer through the conjecture-analysis model of Hillier, Musgrove, and O'Sullivan, the later Jones, and the “design science” proposals of writers such as Cross, Naughton, and Walker; the more broadly based and populist studies of Suckle, Hubel and Lussow, Rowe, and Lawson; recent papers like Hyde, Eckersley, and Roozenburg and Cross; and the plethora of computer-oriented studies represented by the work and editorializing of Gero et al.—there is little agreement about the nature and implications of the term design process. Indeed, there is surprisingly little sustained discussion of process at all, with the majority of discussions assuming an understanding of and familiarity with process and thus centering on activities, methods, or stages believed to be constituent within such a process. With specific reference to architecture and design, this article examines and offers some suggestions on the nature of and implications inhering in the term process. On the basis that it might offer an unproblematic and highly deterministic example of process, the strategy adopted is first to make a detailed analysis of the term recipe and then to use this frame of reference to interrogate and map the largely nondeterministic processes of design. Part 2 will examine in more detail the discourse on and putative models of the design process offered in the literature.     

Predicting the presence of E. coli in tap water using machine learning in Nepal

Within developing countries, a multitude of problems that affect the water supply process can result in the contamination of water taps. While machine learning applications have become popular for attaining efficient water quality predictions, acquiring the necessary data for modelling for developing countries is challenging. This study constructs water quality prediction models by machine learning with a pseudo-pipeline network to complement the missing data of the water supply process. Using both water source and water tap quality information measured by the Government of Nepal, we apply the three machine learning models: support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and LightGBM. Furthermore, we also apply a traditional statistical method—logistic regression (LR)—to the prediction of the Escherichia coli (E. coli) contamination in water taps. With some input variables (such as the length from the nearest sources) obtained from the pseudo-pipeline network, the results show that SVM has stable and high accuracy for both the 26 cities (70%) and for the 25 cities except for Kathmandu (79%). LR performed a significantly lower accuracy for all cities (61%) than for 25 cities (79%). Additionally, we show that our method can be applied to other regions where a water quality survey has not yet been conducted.     

Identification and Adaptive Control for Open Channel Water Flow Systems

Abstract: Despite the continuous advances in the control design for water flow systems such as irrigation and sewer systems, the design and deployment of efficient water flow control systems requires a careful and efficient fine‐tuning of their parameters prior and during the actual system operation. In the majority of water flow control applications, the controller design is based on simplified models (e.g., linear models assuming a fixed time‐delay) for the water flow dynamics and as a result the initial controller design calls for a major fine‐tuning at the initial deployment of the control system; moreover, the frequent changes in water management commands/needs as well as the severe exogenous disturbances call for a continuous update of the controller parameters. Conventional controller tuning approaches cannot be used for the efficient tuning of the controller parameters in water flow control systems, mainly due to the highly nonlinear dependence of the time‐delay with respect to the water flow. In this article, we first introduce and analyze both by means of mathematical analysis and simulation experiments, a computationally simple and efficient methodology for the identification of water flow system dynamics as a State‐dependent Delay Difference Equation (sdDDE) model. The main advantage of this methodology is that it can explicitly identify the nonlinear relationship between the water flow system states and the system time‐delay. Then, we show that such an sdDDE identification scheme can be used for the efficient adaptive tuning of a general class of water flow control systems. More precisely, by exploiting the knowledge—obtained using the sdDDE identification scheme—regarding the nonlinear characteristics of the time‐delay, we come up with a convergent adaptive control scheme, which is able to quickly track rapid changes in setpoint commands and efficiently attenuate severe exogenous disturbances. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme out‐performs significantly existing well fine‐tuned linear and nonlinear control schemes.     

Counter-planning from the kitchen: for a feminist critique of type

Whilst housing has long been a terrain of struggle in terms of its scale, provision, urban morphology and technological advancement, it often escapes a political critique of its interior logic. And yet, it is perhaps only from a political perspective that we might be able to see beyond the impasse we are witnessing. If most of the newly built stock conforms to models established more than a century ago, an increasing number of ‘experimental’ proposals reimagine domesticity with a chequered success that is surprising if we consider how ill-fitting the petit-bourgeois family flat is to our current conditions. In such a conjuncture the concept of type seems to be still a useful ground for debate as it helps us to read housing as a tool for the construction of subjects.

At the core of this mandate crisis lies a great unsaid non-said of western society, namely the role played by the house in the institutionalisation of reproductive labour. Reproductive labour is the care, education and actual production of the labour force from childbearing to housework to the care of the elderly—a form of labour that, before mature capitalism, was never seen as separate from other productive activities. In this sense, this paper assumes a feminist standpoint in that it re-reads modern housing as the place of women’s hidden, unwaged work, and typological discourse as the intellectual and technical arsenal that has allowed the fine tuning of such a labour system.

The hypothesis that will be explored is that reproductive labour itself is undergoing a large-scale shift that architecture is struggling to register. In order to understand this shift, we will look at the recent architectural production of three nations—the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan—where a strong design culture has met an acute awareness of the recent changes in the organisation of work. Looking at work by MVRDV, Christian Kerez and SANAA, we will try to construct a map of possible solutions for housing beyond reproductive labour—and, perhaps, beyond type itself.     

Designing at t + n

In the last four decades, Robert Aish has played a pivotal role in the development of new technologies in architecture. As a professional software designer and developer, he has directly informed building design and processes. As Director of Software Development at Autodesk, his role is to converge innovative concepts such as design computation with mainstream design and engineering software. Also an influential disseminator of knowledge, he is a co-founder of the SmartGeometry Group and has helped create a vital bridge between architectural design and computation. Here he describes some of the critical dilemmas facing both software developers and architectural users of computational design tools, comparing the pioneering work of Bruce Archer and Ivan Sutherland in the mid-1960s (at time t ) with how such tools are used today (at time t + n ). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Just Folks Designing

Abstract

This paper explores some of the unique characteristics that define globalization and global cities through an investigation of recent design trends in New York City restaurants, specifically gentrification, new users of global cities, casualization, and the processes of contestation and absorption of the dominant as well as nondominant cultures and classes in the city as they are played out in the physical, social, and economic morphology of the city over the past fifteen years. I will argue that these features define place in very specific and complex ways. Although locally oriented, restaurants reflect deeper and broader social and economic global forces that help to create the meaning of that space. The importation and exportation of specific restaurants to other existing and emerging global cities is already in progress. As such, restaurants offer a basis for analyzing emerging cities—those that, although not global, have an important relationship to global cities. The findings offered here are part of a larger five-year study of restaurants and come from personal interviews, questionnaires, onsite observations, and sources internal to the restaurant industry as well as other relevant sources.     

Spaces for the elevated personal life: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's concept of the dweller, 1926–1930

Within the discourse that sought to develop housing during the inter-war era in Germany, standardisation was regarded as a means with which to create adequate solutions for the working class. Housing needs were subsumed into a set amount of common denominators that led to beliefs that the design of the house would alter and enhance the conduct of the inhabitant.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's declaration, in the Catalogue of the 1927 housing Exhibition in Stuttgart-Weißenhof, that standardisation, whilst suitable as a means, must never be the goal of architecture, enunciates his critical view of such normative solutions and attempts to coerce the dweller towards a prescribed way of living. In consulting the writings of a number of contemporary philosophers and critics, Mies was able to develop an alternative understanding of the dweller. The book Body—Soul—Unity, by the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, provided Mies with a way of thinking about the inhabitant not as a human being whose lifestyle had to be remediated, but as one who is confident and in harmony with the world. The concept of man and worldview as outlined in Body—Soul—Unity was one of the fundamental intellectual tools that helped Mies in developing his spatial designs of the late 1920s.     

Notes on ANT for designers: ontological,methodological and epistemological turn in collaborative design

This article aims to explore how ANT might help us to rethink collaborative and participatory design (C&PD) practices through converting Bruno Latour's call for risky accounts to a call for design things together. What if ANT starts to be in the business of designing new pieces of technology and not just actor-network accounts of them? What would the design process and its outcomes look like? In response to these questions and to the challenge of co-habitation as vital condition for our technical democracy, I propose three turns in C&PDs. The first is ontological and suggests to design actor networks and to look for ways to make these networks visible. The second is methodological and suggests reimagining co-design as actor networking in public, aided by a much-needed cartography of design. The last is epistemological: it is concerned with what knowledge should inform action in the design process, and it proposes to the idea of the designer as an agnostic Prometheus.     

A Growth Machine's Plan B: Legitimating Development When the Value‐free Growth Ideology is Under Fire

Abstract: Growth machine theory portrays the promotion and legitimation of urban development strictly in terms of the value‐free growth ideology—the claim that growth benefits everyone, that it is a collective good. Based on an analysis of planning documents, newspapers, interviews, and public meetings in San Diego, California, this research argues that the persuasiveness of the value‐free growth ideology is highly variable. Pro‐growth elites bolster the ideology with a range of secondary arguments when the costs of growth are rising. The way growth is both supported and criticized by the same people suggests that they have more fluid and contradictory relationships to urban growth than machine theory's dichotomy of “the machine versus residents” implies. This inconsistency can work to the advantage of pro‐growth elites.     

Artificial Neural Networks for Predicting the Response of Structural Systems with Viscoelastic Dampers

Abstract: Passive energy dissipation systems have been identified as one of the modern structural protective systems against seismic disturbances. Research and development activities are on globally to develop appropriate design procedures and suitable technology for application in the field. Structural systems with energy‐dissipating devices call for rigorous nonlinear analysis, which is a complex one and the results are highly sensitive to the type of input motion and component behavior assumed in the analysis. The Federal Emergency Management Agency 273 (FEMA 273) (1997) has suggested simplified procedures for replacing the original nonlinear system by an equivalent linear system. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques based on artificial neural networks (ANN) have been profitably used for solving complex problems of an iterative nature. Combining the equivalent model with an appropriate AI technique would help one to quickly predict the dynamic response of such yielding systems. This article highlights the feed forward back‐propagation neural network using the Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm for predicting the response quantity of systems with energy‐dissipating devices. The neural network is trained to reflect the nonlinear relationship of strength, stiffness, and damping existing in the system. The methodology developed is illustrated and validated with a chosen example from the FEMA 274 and is found to predict well the average peak displacement, base shear, and roof displacement. Based on these, the sensitivity studies have been carried out and the influence of each parameter on the results have been brought out. It may be noted that sensitivity details and the influence of each parameter do not show up in the regular time‐series analysis. The main advantage of the methodology and the network developed is in quick preliminary decision on the amount and the number of dampers required to reduce peak displacement for a new design as well as for retrofitting.     

Sir Banister Fletcher: pillar to post–colonial readings

Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a ‘world history of architecture’? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture , which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into ‘The Historical Styles’ and ‘The Non-historical Styles’.

Resonating throughout this text, which began as a paper to a conference on ‘Globalisation and Representation’,1 1. This essay is enlarged from a paper given to the international conference Globalisation and Representation, University of Brighton, UK, 11th to 13th March, 2005. is the knowledge that the author has been commissioned to undertake a completely new text for the next edition of Banister Fletcher, for which work started in November, 2005. Pointers to how that project might proceed include its becoming a dual work, aware of the unspoken space between:

— a narrative with stress on points of cultural intersection and articulation of hybridity (after Homi Bhabha) rather than on the ‘constituent’ as opposed to ‘transitory’ facts of architectural history (after Siegfried Giedion), and:

— an archive of illustrated places, itself a social construct but one which recognises the role of viewer/reader in its [re]construction—for images are there to be plundered and misread, which is always their fate in the hands of creative designers.     

Drawing research

To understand research as new to architectural design is to ignore the history of the architect. Research—as the drawing forth of ideas—has been fundamental to the practice of the architect since the Italian Renaissance. The term ‘design’ comes from the Italian disegno, meaning drawing, suggesting both the drawing of a line on paper and the drawing forth of an idea. Disegno enabled architecture, painting and sculpture—the three visual arts—to be recognised as liberal arts concerned with ideas, a position they had very rarely been accorded previously. Alongside the traditional practice of building, architects acquired two new means to practise architecture—drawing and writing—as important as building. Since the Italian Renaissance, independently or together, drawing, writing and building have all been examples of architectural research and means to develop architectural design and the architectural discipline.     

Experimental evaluation of rainwater quality for non-potable applications in the city of São Paulo,Brazil

This study summarizes the evaluation of rainwater quality and its potential for non-potable applications in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. An experimental system was installed at the Centro de Técnicas de Construção Civil (Civil Construction Techniques Centre, Escola Politécnica, University of São Paulo) such that analysis of the physical, chemical and bacteriological composition of rainwater—total and faecal coliforms, Clostridium Sulphite-reducer, Enterococcus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa—could be conducted. The need for water treatment was also evaluated in order to match quality to specific uses. Rainwater samples were collected from the roof by an automatic sample collector. Samples were also collected from a rainwater storage tank. In the operation of the system, analysis of rainwater's potential use in non-potable applications, such as flushing toilet bowls, was also conducted. The results obtained did not meet recognised quality standards, leading to the conclusion that water disinfection prior to use is required.     

全球建筑史方法论:批判与重构

近年来,建筑史书写采用了更具包容性的方法, 融合了不同的声音和观点。尽管有这些进展,现有的建筑史和全球史还存在很多知识盲点、错误和扭曲。本文挑战长期以来主流建筑通史所仰赖的一些基本概念,如风格和运动,提出新方法论,为探索更为精准的全球建筑史书写铺平道路。该方法论强调建筑不同于其他类型的审美对象 （如绘画、雕塑）和设计产品（如汽车、家具）的三个基本特性：建筑为人类存在方式和活动提供空间秩序;建筑的实现有赖于建构、技术、材料和劳动力的整合;建筑是一种集体表达媒介,由不同社会力量之间的相互作用所塑造, 同时也影响着它们之间的相互作用。本文提出的建筑史学三元方法论反映并更新了维特鲁威三元论：以在世性取代实用,建造性取代坚固,交互性取代美观。     

‘Something from nothing’—constructing Israeli rurality

Abstract

This paper analyses the debates regarding native versus non-native plantings in the Israeli kibbutz and their role in the reinvention of the Israeli rural landscape. Based on the assumption that the representation of landscape is always tied to larger questions concerning culture and identity, the genesis of the landscape that has by now become fully naturalised as the new local rural landscape is examined through an analysis of the cultural and ideological roots of its planting design. The Israeli debates reflected the paradox at the heart of a culture that sought to be both ‘new’ and ‘native.’ The ethos of ‘something from nothing’—expressed as the creation of a new green landscape ex nihilo—as well as the advocates for the use of native plants, will be examined in relation to their respective constructions of a landscape narrative.     

The economics of stock pollutants: the example of cadmium

Cadmium is selected as an example of a “stock” pollutant—i.e., one for which no counterpart degrading capacity exists in the environment. The current state of knowledge about cadmium concentration in the environment and the impact of this concentration on biota is assessed. The authors then assess the implications of non‐degradability for orthodox cost‐benefit approaches for assessing socially optimal levels of pollution. They conclude that stock pollutants have features which preclude optimal levels from being established by conventional economic analysis.