Independent Master's Project (12/15/99)
The book Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (Waldrop, 1992) describes a complex system as existing when a number of independent agents interact with each other in many ways. Some examples of complex systems are the many chemically reacting proteins, lipids and nucleic acids that make up a living cell, or the millions of mutually interdependent individuals that make up a human society. Today, scientists of different disciplines are studying complex systems with the belief that there is an underlying unity that will change the way we understand our surroundings and ourselves. These studies in complexity could also be used to change the way we understand, design and build architecture. Architecture, like natural and simulated complex adaptive systems, consists of numerous interacting agents. Some of these include the interactions of the users of the building, the environment in which it is built, the proportions that describe the form, and the programmatic functions that describe its use. There are rules an architect imposes on his/her process of design to deal with these complexities. If the laws used to describe complex systems were applied in the process of design, the result could be an architecture that is as intricate and successful as the structural patterns that emerge out of interactions of these other complex systems. Therefore, this could be a valid process of design capable of producing architecture closely related to the chaos and order that is our environment.
Program
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a non-profit, visiting research institution devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community that focuses on emergent behavior and pattern formation in science, and what has come to be known as studies of complexity and complex adaptive systems. SFI acquired the Hurley-Renfro residence as its first permanent headquarters in 1993. An addition was added at a later date. That addition was not included in the program of this thesis project.
The property is located in a residential district and the house is 9,583 NSF. The mix and sizes of the house do not provide a significant amount of research or administrative space. The sizes of the spaces in the main residence necessitate the sharing of offices by four or more people. Excellent scientists and new research programs have been turned away due to the lack of space. Increasingly, many researchers have been working at home rather than interacting and conversing with others and thus collaboration has been difficult.
Faculty and staff at SFI have expressed an interest in having a working environment that physically manifests the mission of the institute. This institutional interest provides the opportunity for a designer to explore architecturally the theories of complexity under study at SFI. The quantitative requirements of this program can be the raw data used to generate a qualitatively complex physical environment. Providing this environment steeped in complexity theory will serve to facilitate the research taking place within its walls.
Process
The Game of Life is a computer program written in 1970 by John Conway. It traces patterns that are continuously changing over time. It consists of sets of "living" cells arranged in a 2-dimensional grid that are in either of two states: "alive" or dead". The cell's state changes from one generation to the next depending a set of rules. The invention of this program led to numerous iterations of other programs known as Cellular Automata (CA) which are being used in commercial computer graphics and in design of massively parallel computers. They are also being used to simulate biological systems (artificial life) and physical phenomena (heat-flow and turbulence).
CA consists of individual cell updates performed independently of each other. That is, all updates are being done at once. When a cell is updated, its new value is based solely on the old value of the cell of its nearest neighbors. Each cell is updated according to the same rules. CA resembles natural systems in that the fate of any initial configuration of a cellular automaton is either to die out, to become stable or cycle within a fixed period, to grow indefinitely at a fixed speed and to grow and contract irregularly.
CelLab is a program, designed by Rudy Rocker, in which cells are turned on and off just as they are in the Game of Life. elLab they also change color. CelLab is equipped with a number of ready-to-run rules, simulating processes like heat flow, diffusion of gases, and annealing of metal (http://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/). These rules define how its state changes in response to its current state.
CelLab allows you to enter any initial image. I created an abstracted image of the architectural program. It represented research offices surrounding a common space. Support offices surrounded the research offices and beyond that were the spaces that required isolation from the research such as guest houses, classrooms and an auditorium. Colors were used to designate these different room uses. I took that image and loaded it into CelLab and ran it using different rules. The program manipulated my image and I paused it at different points in the generations, both at regular and irregular intervals. I used the resulting images and layers of the images for the form and structure of the building.
Images Produced from the Program CelLab
Schematic Sketches
The Result is the Following Design:
