MPhil/PhD Architectural Design
This thesis aims to recognise the liveliness of matter to account for and technologise its contributions in architectural design practice. My multidisciplinary research establishes how it may be possible to work synergistically with the material realm by establishing fertile metabolic networks and build ecological relationships through the production of architecture. This proposition is experimentally tested using different species of lifelike chemistries at non-equilibrium states that serve as model systems for vibrant matter. Findings indicated that dynamic chemistries could spontaneously produce a new kind of operating system called an ‘assemblage’ that could be technologically operationalised. Assemblages provided an alternative theoretical and practical lens, and technological platform to machines, with different sets of associated concepts, operating principles and qualitatively distinctive outcomes. Design tactics were formulated as a result of these investigations, which were practically explored in the Hylozoic Ground installation by producing a series of responsive chemistries as a prototype assemblage technology. Further experimental and
speculative development of the assemblage operating system was explored through project work in ‘Vibrant Venice’, which proposes to grow an artificial limestone reef underneath the foundations of the city, and ‘Vibrant Cities’, through the production of synthetic soils in under used and poorly imagined sites within urban environments. These technical and design studies suggested that the theory and practice of vibrant matter may give rise to new kinds of material solutions within the practice of the built environment that may be applied to architectural design as ‘vibrant architecture’, which is stochastic and life-promoting. Vibrant architecture may enable architects to codesign in partnership with human and nonhuman collectives, to produce buildings that enliven construction sites through the production of post-natural landscapes. Vibrant architecture consists of varied communities of loosely cooperating, heterogeneous bodies that are united through a common ontology of stardust. Yet, despite the diversity within assemblages, their collective behaviours may be coordinated through ‘natural computing’ approaches which harness the computational properties of the natural world and underpin the practice of vibrant architectural design. Ultimately vibrant architecture may operate as an ecological platform for human development that augments the liveliness of our planet, rather than diminishes it.
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The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014
Rachel Armstrong Vibrant Architecture: How ‘Vibrant Matter’ may Raise the Status of the Material World in Architectural Design Practice and be Recognised as a Codesigner of our Living Spaces Principal Supervisor: Professor Neil Spiller Subsidiary Supervisors: Professor Stephen Gage, Professor Martin Hanczyc