Urban Morphogenesis Lab Claudia Pasquero with Zachary Fluker, Enriqueta Llabres, Maj Plemenitas, Eduardo Rico
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2015
Students Sora Chang, Junyi Chen, Chunyi Chen, Qianxin Deng, Junyi Jia, Ting Jiang, Ying Hu, Yiran Hu, Boliang Liu, Han Liu, Shengyu Meng, Israel Luna Mino, Shah Muhaymin, Dongming Sun, Ge Sun, Jiateng Sun, Liran Sun, Fei Tong, Bona Wang, Shiyang Wang, Yichao Wang, Zhuoran Xie, Luyao Xu, Min Xue, Xuyuan Yao, Wenzhe Ye, Tianxue Zang, Yifei Zhao, Yilin Zhou, Lumeng Xiao Computation Tutors Manuele Gaioni, Immanuel Koh, Antonios Lalos, Enriqueta Llabres, Iker Mugarra, Maj Plemenitas History Theory Tutors Sara Franceschelli, Emmanouil Zaroukas Thanks to our critics and consultants Caterina Albertucci, Alessandro Bava, Richard Beckett, Roberto Bottazzi, Carole Collet, Marcos Cruz, Gina Fellendorf-Perkins, Stuart Maggs, Marco Poletto, Simon Park, Alfredo Ramirez, Gilles Retsin, Liz Tatarintseva Thank you to our partners European Space Agency (ESA) and the International Nanotechnologies Laboratory (INL)
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The Urban Morphogenesis Lab engages urban design as a computational practice to prefigure alternative models of the city represented as a complex dynamic system. The ambition of the Lab is to stimulate a transdisciplinary discourse that reaches wider academic research networks and scientific organisations involved in the study of the city as a living system, and to develop future bio-digital technologies. The Lab adopts computational, analogue, biological and digital design methods to draw terrains of negotiation between strategic and tactical forms of intervention. Coding enables the study of biological models, generating a multiplicity of effects at scales ranging from the molecular to the territorial, from the quasi-instantaneous to the geological. The Lab’s work is largely studio-based and students are encouraged to work in teams and to engage design as a form of research. Current research focuses on the urban application of models of collective intelligence inspired by slime mould’s biological algorithms and mycelium fungi, on the development of resilient and distributed bio-energy infrastructures, on the engineering of bio-digital soil remediation and articulation as well as on the material articulation of adaptive water management territories. Students have been investigating computational processes, mastering the use of digital simulation as an analytical design tool, investigating the relationship between the physical and the digital. Initial abstract studies were informed through the recursive processes that have been gradually introducing context, providing a wide range of specific data, internal and external conditions, limitations and potentials for design intervention. The main focus has been on processes as well as intermediate and finite states of morphogenetic design studies. Analogue modelling is used extensively in the Lab. Students have developed wet models and living test-beds where digital morphologies are inoculated with living organisms. These biotechnological hybrids allow us to test the local metabolic manipulation of flows of renewable energy, information and matter, as well as the emergence of urban networks of collective exchange. These experiments have been making use of physical computing as well as remote sensate data to create a live communication stream between wet models, the living organism and the digital urban simulation codes. Urban protocols are re-described as interactive design toolkits. The students work on the development of tools that help understand design as a collective project where negotiation and tactics drive the generation of urban morphologies in real time. Feedback is captured in a set of visual outputs, such as video interfaces, time-lapse photography and parametric drawings.