International Journal of Architectural Computing

With weak Artificial Intelligence in the pockets of the majority of American adults, a societal introduction of a strong Artificial Intelligence or sentience seems close. Although the “intelligence” of our phones’ intelligence can be laughably brittle, the learning capacity demonstrated by the Internet of Things suggests more robust intelligence is on the way, and some would say it has already arrived. Several private technology firms have asserted that a robust Artificial Intelligence already exists and thought leaders within computation are lining up to ensure that it is not evil. Regardless of the morality of Artificial Intelligence, if our charge as architects is to design occupiable space, then we need to consider post-anthropocentric ecologies as well as how to adapt our design strategies to reflect inclusion of other species. This article describes two linked lines of thought, a meditation on the pending societal inclusion of the robotic other and why that robotic sentience may arrive from an unexpected origin and can reshape how we conceive of architecture itself.

Since the publication in 1948 of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, this thought model has exerted a profound influence in contemporary knowledge. Such influence has been decisive for a paradigm shift in the profession of architecture and particularly for the rise of a computational perspective in architectural design. This article explores the link between the cybernetic paradigm and the conception of architectural objects as performative, responsive, intelligent, and sentient artifacts—the visions of buildings that have been central to the development of digital architecture since its early stages. This connection shows that the dominant visions of design problems associated with the development of a computational perspective in architecture have not been exclusively the result of the introduction of computer pragmatics in architectural design. On the contrary, following such scholars as Bruno Latour and Katherine Hayles, these developments must be considered as the result of a particular feedback process that includes technical aspects as well as the definition of design problems around an informational ontology and epistemology. The understanding of the intellectual foundations of digital architecture is crucial not only to promote a critical regard of its productions but to imagine scenarios for a viable cybernetic practice of computer-mediated architectural design.

The article describes a method for gamifying the design and assembly of computationally integrated structures built out of discrete identical blocks. As a case study, the interactive installation Sensitive Assembly was designed and built at the Digital Design Unit (Prof. Dr Oliver Tessmann) at the Technische Universität of Darmstadt and exhibited during the digital art festival NODE 2015 in Frankfurt in 2015. Sensitive Assembly invites people to play a Jenga-like game: starting from a solid wall, players are asked to remove and replace the installation’s building blocks to create windows to a nurturing light while challenging its stability. A computational system that senses the current state of the wall guides the physical interaction and predicts an approaching collapse or a new light beam breaking through. The installation extends the notion of real-time feedback from the digital into the physical and uses machine-learning techniques to predict future structural behaviour.

The implementation of active and responsive materials in architecture and construction allows for the replacement of digitally controlled mechanisms with material-based systems that can be designed and programmed with the capacity to compute and execute a behavioral response. The programming of such systems with increasingly specific response requires a material-driven computational design and fabrication strategy. This research presents techniques and technologies for significantly upscaling hygroscopically actuated timber-based systems for use as self-constructing building surfaces. The timber’s integrated hygroscopic characteristics combined with computational design techniques and existing digital fabrication methods allow for a designed processing and reassembly of discrete wood elements into large-scale multi element bilayer surfaces. This material assembly methodology enables the design and control of the encoded direction and magnitude of humidity-actuated responsive curvature at an expanded scale. Design, simulation, and material assembly tests are presented together with formal and functional configurations that incorporate self-constructing and self-rigidizing surface strategies. The presented research and prototypes initiate a shift toward a large-scale, self-construction methodology.

As the knowledge of material computation advances, continuing the seamless integration of design and fabrication, questions beyond materialization can be addressed with a focus on sensing, feedback, and engagement as critical factors of design exploration. This article will discuss a series of prototypes, design methodologies, and technologies that articulate a textile’s micro-architecture, at the scale of fibers and stitches, to instrumentalize simultaneous structural, spatial, and sensory-responsive qualities. The progression of research displays an ever-deepening instrumentalization of fiber structure and its implications to form definition and responsivity, in creating form- and bending-active structures. The research results in a more refined definition of material behavior as the innate phenomena which emerge at the moment of textile fabrication. Ultimately, the architecture, in its materiality and physical, visual, and auditory responsivity, is designed to address specific challenges for children in filtering multiple sensory inputs, an underlying factor of autism spectrum disorder.