RC14
Big Data Architecture: Materialising the Virtual Roberto Bottazzi, Kostas Grigoriadis
Students Xiangjun Jiang, Chuanren Lin, Xi Meng, Horeb Moses, Constantinos Nicolaides, Jaewon Shin, Jacky Thiodore, Jing Wang, Lei Wang, Jiajuan Yan, Pengchen Yao, Haihua Zhu, Qiuyang Zhang, Jiaxin Zhao, Leijie Zhong
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2016
Project teams Recycled Island Xiangjun Jiang, Jiajuan Yan, Haihua Zhu, Leijie Zhong Community of Wind Chuanren Lin, Xi Meng, Lei Wang, Qiuyang Zhang Dustopia Horeb Moses, Constantinos Nicolaides, Jaewon Shin, Jacky Thiodore City Tuner Jing Wang, Pengchen Yao, Jiaxin Zhao Thanks to our critics Laura Allen, Stefania Boccaletti, Peter Bishop, Lindsay Bremner, Marjan Colletti, Richard Difford, Jeg Dudley, Stephen Gage, Chris Green, Lorenzo Greco, Manuel Jiménez García, Laura Kurgan, Frédéric Migayrou, Andrew Porter, Gilles Retsin, Mark Smout, Sabine Storp, Edoardo Tibuzzi, Patrick Weber, Paolo Zaide
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Research Cluster 14 (RC14) explores the role of Big Data in urban design. Big Data – commonly defined as the possibility to aggregate and mine large datasets by employing computers – is often understood as a series of abstract techniques without spatial or visual qualities. RC14 challenges this perception by developing an applied research agenda in which the capabilities provided by ever-more powerful computation to mine data is utilised to question the role of urban design in the light of the ever-thinning distinction between man-made structures and natural environments. We live in the age of the Anthropocene, the recently discovered geological stratum resulting from the overwhelming influence of human actions on the earth and its biosphere. In this scenario, environmental phenomena such as global warming can no longer be seen as simply ‘natural’ but rather produced by human actions that temper climatic factors. Formerly stable, ‘reductionist’ binaries such as natural/artificial or subject/object melt away and, similarly, linear causality gives way to a more complex, fluid, open, incomplete, embracing way to account for the transformations of the urban environment. The consequences of these observations for urban design can be profound: received notions of type, programme, site, representation and finally human inhabitation will have on such urban environments all need questioning. Within the cluster, students were asked to map existing conditions as dynamic, volumetric flows in constant transformation operating at varying scales: by computing large amounts of data they not only produce maps to ‘see’ the site of intervention differently, but also to co-design it in conjunction with natural, complex forces whose complexity far exceeds the power designers have to control them. In its first instalment, RC14 concentrated on East London. The area surrounding City Airport – crossed by both natural flows spanning from the bottom of the Thames to the sky over the airport – has been the centre of series of proposed developments that may profoundly alter its future image. The four urban projects developed within the cluster chose an environmental material to co-design with: water, pollution, sound and plastic became four entry points into the area. Each group developed a range of urban interventions spanning from strategic moves, to infrastructural works, to public spaces and material details. These interventions not only interact with their environment to adapt to shifting conditions but also, crucially, to instigate change.