Locating considerations of movement in design
For most of this book, movement in architectural design has been considered from the viewpoint of the observer/occupant.1 It is they who are expected to move through the synthesised environments contrived by the architect. Spatial devices such as the route, arcade, corridor, ramp, stair, pier, etc., attest to this. They are generally conceived as static elements, charged with the goal of steering occupant movement and framing socio-spatial practices such as the pilgrimage, the procession, the promenade or the dérive. We might call this approach to the consideration of movement – where the responsibility of movement is attributed to the observer – as anthropocentric.
There are notable works that experiment with a different point of departure in which movement is considered as a capacity of the proposition itself. For example, Ron Herron’s ‘A walking city’ (1964) conveys this ambition in the title alone.2 In this visionary proposition and its subsequent iterations, the city becomes itinerant, emancipating itself from geograph -ical fixity. The Maison du Peuple (1935) in Clichy, France, by Lods, Beaudouin, Prouvé and Bodiansky, was a built example, with movable floors: the building fabric was actively transformable to support multiple programmes, in the same location, at different times of day – a densification strategy that establishes synergies between programme, temporality and place. A third example is Brunelleschi’s device for testing the validity of his perspectival representa -tion of the Florentine Baptistry. It incorporated areas of burnished silver on the picture plane that directly reflected portions of the Baptistry’s context, constructing ‘live’ areas of movement within the representation.3
I suggest that the correspondence binding these three examples is a non-anthropocentric concern with movement – that is to say, the three architectural artefacts can be understood as con -cerned with movement arising from sources other than the observer. These three exemplify, respectively, the visionary, the built and the representational – realms necessarily interdepend -ent if one is engaging in the design and realisation of materially dynamic architectures. The experience of our research points to a need to develop synergetic relations between new conceptualisations, new methods of designing, new representational tools and new material systems. This chapter examines these issues through two interrelated research projects developed at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) as part of a broader enquiry at the intersection between architecture (considered as both practice and spatial construct) and digital technologies.
The Persistent Model project
The Persistent Model project examines how digital technologies can support new relations between representation and built artefact. The parent project is developed through discrete sub-projects. Each sub-project investigates specific questions by engagement with the development of new design tools and production of full-scale demonstrations, two of which have been completed and exhibited, and a third was under development at the time of writing. The origins of the overarching hypothesis for the project can be located in Stephen Groák’s assertion that, ‘The very conventions of representation also can affect the character of the buildings to which they subsequently give rise’.4 It follows that, if we reconstruct our methods of representation, we also construct the opportunity for realising qualitatively different spaces and places. The project engages three principal areas in which changes to the conventions of representation are considered: the duration of active influence that representation can hold in relation to the represented; the means, methods and media through which representations are constructed and used; and what it is that is being represented. These concerns with representation are tuned towards operating with material dynamics as a principal design driver and their deployment in dynamic architectures – material assemblies with an inherent capacity for movement.
Free-form metal inflation is a fabrication process that establishes a dependence between the given boundary profile of a ‘cushion’ component and the material mechanisms at work when the steel cushion moves, under internal loading, from the elastic to the plastic regime. This is where introduced energy starts to become irrecoverable, and permanent forming occurs. As the component is a cushion, the act of inflation increases the cross-sectional area, but, as the pressures involved are low, there is negligible change in the total surface area. Depending on the boundary profile, this leads to self-generating buckling phenomena and a material reluctance to form double curvature. Another point of interest is that the inflation process can be arrested and resumed arbitrarily, allowing components to be partially inflated.5 This segues to the interesting notion of ‘harvesting’ the performance potential of any individual component, as required over time.6 The two projects described below took free-form metal inflation as a starting point for architectural constructs with an inherent potential capacity for movement.
Persistent Model #1
The first full-scale demonstration – Persistent Model #1 – was developed for the CITA exhibition digital.material, held at the ROM Gallery for Art and Architecture, Oslo, in 2010. The exhibition comprised four CITA projects, each offering nuanced perspectives on digital design practice and its role in enabling a new culture of material thinking in architectural design. The four full-scale demonstrations – Reef Pattern, Thaw, Lamella and Persistent Model #1 – showed how digital tools can enable extensions to existing material and craft practices and their associated logics of construction. Particular attention was given to designing with material performance as a design driver, and various trajectories of investigation were explored, based on this common starting point.7 Persistent Model #1 explored how digital technologies permit the reconsideration of relationships between representation and realisation. We wanted to know how digital technologies might support continuous feedback between spaces of representation and realisation, and what material system could allow driveable spatial transforms over time. A feedback model would support the ability to incorporate unanticipated transforms in the material system and open the way for further design speculation. Steel cushions formed through low-pressure inflation allowed us to investigate significant spatial movements. These movements started as mechanical transforms at the material level and then percolated through component and assembly to organisations of material and component. Inflation of the assembly began at the opening of the exhibition to dramatise the dynamic process.
A significant design challenge was the fact that the inflation process caused the component to deviate from the initial drawings used to cut the profiles (Figure 4.7.1), thereby making preceding representations redundant. The representational question arose of how these transformations in component attributes could be captured as operational and explicit parameters in a design context. In Persistent Model #1, this question was compounded by the fact that the assembly’s constituent components were selectively inflated, causing transforms across hierarchies of scale (from material to component to assembly) and defying our ability to model the result predictively by digital means.
A representational model was established alongside the built construct, introducing a feedback loop between the space of design and the space of material presence (Figure 4.7.2). Changes to the physical construct were mapped back on to an abstracted representation, allowing subsequent decisions to be made on the basis of the as-built condition, rather than an idealised condition. The role of the model, therefore, shifted between recording the actual changing conditions and providing the basis for subsequent speculation and specification. The resulting digital construct possessed the qualities of being steered yet unanticipated, both deliberate and tempered by dynamic behaviour of the material (Figure 4.7.3).
Figure 4.7.1 The initial profile geometry of free-form inflated metal cushions is a primary determinant of the extent of deviation exhibited under inflation
Source: Phil Ayres/CITA