AA DRL | INTERLACE

Studio Master: Patrik Schumacher 

Course Tutor: Pierandrea Angius 

Team: Huiyuan Li (China), Ruixue Wang (China), Man Mei Lam (China), Xuan Zhou (China) 

Being in the twenty-first century, thanks to the rapid growing information technology, the bottom up co-working style has been proven to be more efficient and innovative than traditional working style. 

In this studio, agent-based phenomenology (Gestalt) is the guiding principle to design a dynamic incubator office environment. Gestalt theory introduces that the space we belong to follows the way we perceive the the space. Therefore, the space can be dramatically reformed by minor transformation of spatial triggering elements. Based on this understanding, we applied multi-stability as our design concept that can switch between states economically from its ambiguous property. 

To design an incubator office building, one of the main challenges is from the constantly changing complex interaction among different companies, groups, and job types. To address the challenge, the design started from kinetic furniture and field organization. Different families of furniture act like swarms of living beings interact with users and create a dynamic working environment. The design logic of the “Interlace” multi-stable field is starting from overlapping convex geometries. We generated a poly-grid system to standardize and makes the overlapping events prototypical. Multi-stable field allows switching between different states economically. 

In the architecture perspective, the “Interlace” carries multi-stability concept in a large urban scale. The building is split into four zones. By switching architectural elements such as skylight and partitions, the four zones can be merged together and form larger zones. The flexibility of architectural programming adapts the complex need of future co-working environment. The multi-stability concept has also been carried further into urban scale to form urban grouping and street room. By applying phenomenology theory, the multi-stable “interlace” incubator office has the potential to adapt complex scenario of future working from micro working grouping to macro urban grouping. As users have more freedom to access their need in a highly adaptive environment, we believe they can be much more efficient, creative and inspiring.

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.