AA DRL | HEX(I)finity

Studio Master: Patrik Schumacher

Course tutor: Pierandrea Angius

Team: Haotian Man (China), Xiaodan Yang (China), Lu Wang (China), Chendan Zhang (China)

In the eighteenth-century dedicated office buildings emerged as an urban space, and since then the typology has seen many iterations and evolutions. Today, the office space enters a new era that aims to create an equilibrium between required privacy and productivity to achieve maximum efficiency. Based on the research, the team proposes that the contemporary office space must present a dynamic ecosystem rather than a static monoculture. To address the growing need of start-up company in the UK, we proposed a dynamic office space in Stoke Newington, London with multiple research outcomes. Hex(i)nfinity is an incubator co-working office building that aims to facilitate the experimental ideas of start-ups. As a starting point, the proposal utilised furniture, the smallest unit of architecture, as a

‘furniture-field-function’ structure that has a decisive role in affecting basic human behaviour. Utilising phenomenology and the Gestalt grouping principle, the furniture family achieves kinetic features and multiple usage. Together, the combination and grouping of the furniture forms a swarm that constitutes an initial field on which start-ups can be employed. The field has the potential to grow into an infinite capacity for company expansion or a particular event. The architecture that results from this research is a 3-dimensional interlaced floor plate system that retains the capability to form an infinite field, by manipulating the position of the plates in the vertical plane. Inspired by the erosion of waves and crowd simulation, the disposition of the floor plates provides the community with a pedestrian- friendly space at the ground floor. The entire system, of furniture inter- connected within the fields, allows for a dynamism that addresses the ever-changing needs of the London’s start-up culture.

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.