Aa drl | cor(al)ations

Studio Master: Patrik Schumacher

Course tutor: Pierandrea Angius

Team: Michel Ghulmiyyah (Lebanon), I-Tzu Wang (Taiwan), Yu Sun (Taiwan), Maria Laura Barriola (Spain)

Cor(al)ations is a research project that explores the role of the built enviroment in a rapidly changing time like today. Like evrything, architecture must change to adjust and adapt to our changing needs, thus, must become responsible for providing a new level of social functionality as well as a sense of order to the agency of its users. Cor(al)ations is a scenario-based design research that explores new spatial workspace typologies that can make up the ideal tech start-up incubator in London. Typologies that are dynamic enough to adapt to the ever-changing human and economic patterns of the future. Typologies that we simply leave to emerge and define themselves as a result of a correlation between human agents within a space and various dynamic systems designed to enhance work performance. This research relies on designing the agency of the occupants of a space taking into account the dynamic social and behavioural patterns of those agents and testing the layers of complexity that may arise  along the way. This research makes use of the the spatial complexity that arises from a hybrid of systems in order to define new levels of communication and flexibility that the conventual workspace lacks. This is done by designing various systems at different scales, from a furniture scale to an urban scale and allowing them to corelate together along with the human agents. Vigorous testing of those systems under different conditions is performed along the way both physically and computationally.

In this research, flexible and dynamic spatial patterns are proven necessary for efficient workspace design and are proven achievable by applying the principals of “phenomenology” to both the design process as well as the space itself. Principles of phenomenology along with well-designed reactive systems can achieve new patterns in the workspace that can contribute to the success and health of startups of different sizes and natures within an incubator. Such patterns include spatial patterns, communicative patterns, social patterns, circulation patterns, and many more.

Studio Master: Patrik Schumacher

Course Tutor: Pierandrea Angius

Architectural Association Design Research Laboratory

Future Work - Urban and Architectural Semiology

The societal function of urban and architectural design is the innovative ordering of social processes. This function depends on the communicative capacity of the designed environment. The enhancement of this capacity poses the Semiological Project: to design the architectural project as a spatio-visual language.

The life process of society is a communication process that is ordered via rich typology of communicative situations. The built environment is thus society’s physical memory; it functions as a graphic language or map that we all intuitively navigate to find relevant communication partners in pre-structured situations. The designed settings/spaces are themselves communications: they are communications that define, premise and prime the communicative interactions that are expected to take place within the respectively framed territory. Building is communicating. 

The studio will start by researching various visual languages like traffic sign systems or graphic notational systems as source domains for semiological design. The design of an architectural semiological system implies the build-up of a system of distinctions with spatial position, shape, morphology, materiality, colour etc. as registers of semantic encoding. The basic unit of architectural communication is the single space, zone or territory as architectural sign defining a particular, distinct social situation. 

The programme to be accommodated is best understood in terms of interaction patterns of the users/participants. These patterns of communicative interaction can be modelled via scripted agents that respond to the coded environmental clues. This implies that the meaning of architecture can enter the digital model (design medium) and thus becomes the object of cumulative design elaboration. The system of signification works if the agents consistently respond to the relevant positional and morphological clues so that the behaviours to be expected can be read off the articulated environmental configuration. As agents cross significant thresholds their behavioural rules are modulated. Territorial distinctions thus order and coordinate interaction patterns.