Assembling Flows

Assembling Flows A chaotic task enabled by a part-to-whole strategy

Fig.1 Robotic assemblage

Critical Written Reflection Spring Semester 2020 Written by Lars Erik Elseth Studio 2B / Computational Building Development / Aarhus School of Architecture

Preface As students of architecture, we operate within a vast sea of content – and simultaneously we must navigate through it. How do we assemble this content? We can only process so much data before it gets the best of us.

That is why we tend to simplify and design systems within the limits of our imagination.

In my semester project, I look at how to employ a future infrastructure for the city of Hamburg. The city as I see it has employed a self-distributed fleet of robots which reifies (ex. re-structures, or re-inhabits) the urban landscape continuously.

The vividness of this system is enabled by a single robot’s ability to perform simple tasks in-sync with its neighbours. Rather than designing through top-down decision-making, my studio project (The Porter Project 2020)1 looks at the making of the part-object, the robot, and its implications on the world around it.

Reader’s manual I have structured the writing in three different formats. It includes a main body, flows and a dictionary.

The main body - This forms the centrepiece on which the other two texts can manifest themselves. Here I tie in historic references and contemporary discourse as a way to situate my project in a fact-based territory.

The flows - I see these as sanctuaries of information that I can pick apart and start to build meaningful assemblies from. I have highlighted keywords that in many cases instigates the beginnings of something.

The dictionary - This is is a sort of personal reference work that describes some of the flows in relation to my project.

1 Lars Erik Elseth “The Porter Project” Aarhus Arkitektskolen

Table of Contents Key terms

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Introduction 6 Main text

Part I: Simple Verb Tech / Guiding Principles for Architecture

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Part II: The Moving / Modularity in Architecture

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Part III: Building Blocks/ The Discrete in Architecture

Part IV: Urban Formations/ Economy in Architecture

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Conclusion

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Table of Figures

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Bibliography

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Key terms Whole-to-part: A type of approach where design is strictly tied to a holistic point of view.

Geometry is formed by an overarching strategy. All aspects are typically designed by a human.

Part-to-whole: Design that considers the bits and pieces that makes the whole. It focuses on the logic of assembly and how simple primitives, once combined, can perform complex tasks and objectives.

Flow: A source of information or notion that has an impact on our daily decision making however relevant it may be. They may also vary in size and intervals.

Introduction As architects, we can look at information – but we need to return form.

So, we rationalize and make decisions – the clock is ticking after all.

In the process, we have essentially skipped through many levels of information and so we tend to form wholes rather than parts. Even when the construction industry, as we know it, always deals with parts. Never wholes.

We are responsible for, the development of functional arrangements and working bodies. We are bottlenecks; forming decisions and interpreting informational flows. We strive to, make sense of our surroundings when we enter unknown territory.

"Ability to organize and manage work, development of complex, and unpredictable processes, (...)" (Arkitektskolen 2019)2

The way we organize, equip, program, plan, or arrange – is close to how we form. We must likely be able to make form, faster than before.

Software is immediate in today’s architecture. But our software-suite is also limited and sometimes we forget the extremely basic, instinctive abilities we possess as architects. Like the action-verbs for processing information, as mentioned above. These are commands which have instructed the development of all geometric software in the first place.

Who’s to say we can’t still use them?

CUTS The way we disect information and deal with it in parts.

DISTINCTIONS Certain things stand out and triggers parasitic behavior; these are site energies.

BODILESS The overall form should not be the driver of architecture, nor should one shape be more important than the other.

BREAKDOWNS

“Isomorphism, canonical body, exogastrular, graft, ‘almost freakish hybrid’, bodiless, cuts are productive, pulsional machinery, ‘flow is an everyday, unqualified notion... a flow of words, a flow of ideas, a flow of shit…’, machines interrupts flows, antioedipus (desiring machine body without organs subject), a magnificent vision of madness, auto-nomy, caesura (pause between organ and body), breakdowns, shortcuts, short circuits, ‘living today in the age of partial objects…We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of (dead) fragments (p.223)’, ‘Once his body became a smooth surface, inscriptions could be added, engraved or erased. (p.226)’, maphrodites (body with two sexes), ‘robot comes from the Czech robota, meaning “boredom” or monotomy…(p.229)’, autopoiesis and ecotechnics (p.232), subtle ontological distinctions, techne, organon, gender conscious, coalesce (Hernan D. Alonso) (p. 234), (...)" (Teyssot 2003)3

2 Arkitektskolen, A. “Academic Regulations for the Master of Arts in Architecture” Aarhus, p.4 3 Georges Teyssot “Prosthetics and Parasites” MIT Press, Ch. 7, p. 219-251

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The systems we design can have failures, but instead of collapsing they rebuild themselves.

FRAGMENTS Aspects or dialects of our architecture.

All systems can have local traits and mutations.

Fig.2 Robots interpreting flow

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REJECT THE USE OF DIGITAL TOOLS

"Inner joints, polymorphic, more compressed?, ‘like a cyborg but without the excitement of science fiction…(p.233)’, Austrian neo-avant-garde, Aktionismus movement (Vienna), say himmelblau, joyous, skin, reject the use of digital tools, (…)”

There is no right way to use digital tools, so break the rules and show authorship.

(Teyssot 2003)4.

HORIZONTAL PLANES Tech hives tend to be built like grids, all in the one plane, but what if you could stack things on top of and next to each other with overhangs.

Voxels, rather than pixels.

SORTING Instructions, information, actions, logs; it all have to be processed, but not by us - by robots. We live in a Ctrl+F era, search for it.

It is our job as architects to work through information, regardless of how obscure or fragmented it seems. At the very minimum, we need to achieve functionality. Whether it be pages of text or a series of futuristic robots, can we assemble it using simple principle commands?

Part I: Simple Verb Tech / Guiding Principles for Architecture As of today, many visionaries are seeking a way into automation. The tech-giants have established their warehouses built as hive-like facilities laid out in horizontal grids, for the future of engineering.

“Horizontal planes, performance, actualize, codification, indexing and naming, reveal, artificial geographies, sorting, (…)” (Corner 1999)5.

Places like these are forerunners of technology and specialize in how to streamline robotic processes. Take Ocado for instance, a UK-based tech company that has deployed a fleet of robots to sort groceries6. As individuals they can only perform simple actions such as “lifting”, “moving”, or “sorting”, but collectively they can communicate and run most of the production on the lot. Rather than mapping out where the robots will be at any given point in time – most of the time is spent on developing structural guiding principles.

Programming the robot’s set of behaviours is of top priority while deciding on what the actual groceries should be is of less importance. The robot doesn’t know what it is picking up, yet it knows how, because one of its functions covers that part. This is part-to-whole design thinking. As technology evolves, simple words and actions could play an important role in the way we understand complexity, but also how we can generate it.

4 Teyssot, G. “Prosthetics and Parasites” MIT Press, Ch. 7, p. 219-251 5 James Corner “The Agency of Mapping” essay in Mappings 6 James Vincent “Welcome to the Warehouse of the Future” Verge, §7

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Fig.3 Cubicle module

CAPACITY The resolution of architecture depends on the system's capacity to store, collect and define the limits of space arund us continously.

STREAMS Agents with similiar objectives may join and form aggregates.

“Cheap, capacity to [collect, store, process], ancient logarithms, four-viewports, informational models, streams, without fallback to conv. plans, digital replicas, informational bottlenecks, bypass, calculus, [x,y,z], logs, same conditions reoccurring, (…)” (Carpo 2015)7.

The companies that are developing these future systems are doing it within a closed indoor environment. That means that they are not necessarily systems that would work well in an outdoor environment.

The future as portrayed by tech-companies is engineered in front of them on the production lot, one step at a time. Architecture on the other hand typically operates with a larger timeline and an open-environment.

Part II: The Moving / Modularity in Architecture Any project of architecture pushing static building conventions would to some degree come to terms with Cedric Price’s vision. A realm of moving units either on rails or within a confined spatial grid. The work of Price was opportunistic yet open-ended. His projects would typically have the capacity to move from one state to another, with no single composition being more qualified than another. It was perhaps through his collaboration with Gordon Pask that he was able to fully communicate his complex systems. Pask was an engineer that helped Price develop circuit diagrams that described the unsettledness of his building8.

7 Carpo, Mario. “Big Data and the End of History” MIT Press, p. 46-59 7 Shota Vashakmadze “Cedric Price: Uncertain Variability” Georgia Tech School of Architecture, §2

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Fig.4 Cybernetics diagram by Gordon Pask

In the Potteries Thinkbelt project, a module would be plugged to an old rail network in Staffordshire. The promise was a fully operational interchange- and play between educational modules shifting from one mode of study to another on the English countryside.

“Make maps not tracings" (Corner 1999)9

Inevitably, Cedric Price was an architect that urged his profession to become more immutable10 and perhaps more fun. Today we are well aware of modular design, yet it remains difficult to execute. Which raises the question; do our habitats need to move? The robot module is one that is based on commerce and service. It is an inversed scenario where the robot only transports goods and the human stays in place.

9 Corner, J. “The Agency of Mapping” Mappings 9 St. Johns “Anti-Building for the Future: The World of Cedric Price” University of Cambridge, §6-8

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Part III: Building Blocks / The Discrete in Architecture

Fig.5 Manoeuvering robots

If we imagine robots being ‘free’ to wander in our cities. What would that look like? Small robots suddenly appearing in busy road intersections.

Instant chaos, right?

These robots could begin to occupy and fill space, and be propositionally rich, but not in a dystopian fashion like what was proposed for the Lower Manhattan Expressway11 by Paul Rudolph in the 1960s. The robots are lightweight. They do not occupy the space forever. They have their own set of behaviours, their world view. They know how to talk to each other, how to stack, and where to drop off parcels. These behavioural traits, once multiplied, would aesthetically evolve and dissolve depending on the driving factors of their environment.

6 Goldberger, Paul. “Paul Rudolph’s Manhattan Megastructure” §4

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Part IV: Urban Formations / Economy in Architecture We have already seen the beginnings of short-lived mobility devices. We know them as e-scooters. Although it has caused disturbances in citycentres, it has also addressed redundancy. They are market-driven and typically deal with rent per usage12. The e-scooter is not autonomous and fails at simple organisational tasks (essential for a well-working urbanism) like how to align itself to others or how to communicate in larger groups.

“Urban ground as treasure map, paths of travels, becomes erosions, an otherwise black unknown territory, rhythms, knots, boundaries, connections, heterogeneity, tangencies, can you occupy space without filling it, wilderness, ambiguous, hybrids, nature will dismantle manmade systems, (…)” (Porter Project 2020)13.

IN CLUSTERS Robots are three dimensional periodic shapes meaning that they can align and adhere to each other in chunks.

FORMATIONS Groups of robots could form distinctive patterns as a means of communicating to other groups about their size, their intent and their evolution.

The robot knows ecactly how to do this. The economy would rule where each of these robots spawn and how they evolve into formations.

Shifting “time-scapes” as opposed to streetscapes, meaning operational clusters changing throughout the day based on the energies of the site.

Each robot would have a distinct motivation to carry out its delivery order.

However, if a bunch of robots were travelling in the same direction, they could help each other out and perform a larger delivery as a group.

These groupings or couplings are coincidences that would occur similar to Conway’s “Game of Life”14. An urbanism like this would have many endings and resolutions as each day would essentially be played out like a game.

“…in clusters, in an almost electrolytical manner, technical specifications, on bridge undercroft, as crypted messages for passer-by engineers, soft-transportation devices, lime-scooters, formations, small hotspots, dead road islands, no scooters on the promenade, updated numeric data, statistics of water level rise, (…)” (Porter Project 2020)15

12 Conrad Zbikowski “Lime Quietly Raises Prices on Scooter Rentals”, Streets, §4-7 13 Lars Erik Elseth “The Porter Project” Aarhus Arkitektskolen 14 John Conway “Game of Life” Cellular automata 15 Elseth. L “The Porter Project” AAA

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OCCUPY SPACE WITHOUT FILLING IT The moving robot enables a time-based architecture that could reify the urban landscape as we know it.

“…on-the-way landmarks and nutritionary life-supply, stability-check and weight capacity, load up, oops there’s “void-outs”, an analogue, decontaminating suit, facilitate connections, granted ability to sense, reconnect, avoid extinction, (…)”

(Death Stranding 2019)16

Conclusion The future does not look smooth, on the contrary, I think it is a patchwork of smaller bits and pieces. These pieces are best fit together if they can become building blocks. Like robots that can stack. We can deploy basic action-words to handle complexity in the form of flows. These action-words can have a large impact if deployed iteratively. Some of the most basic words in our planning-vocabulary like arrange - relives in new simulation software (like anemone or nursery, both plugins for grasshopper).

The simulation software loops through many generations of content.

Each command has a lifetime before its impact fades away. Digital tools can allow us to draw time-based architecture, similar to how ink infiltrates paper. However, the output will be vast and so we must learn to operate surgically; searching for patterns and returning parts.

At last, new software reenacts almost philosophical ways of thinking back into architecture. These include geometric commands such as; Search, Attend, Align, Conform, Dismantle, Distribute, Charge, Assemble. As well as the iteration-based ones (the re-‘s); Re-Search, Re-Attend, Re-Align, ReConform, Re-Dismantle, Re-Distribute, Re-Charge, Re-Assemble.

"(...) in a post-pandemic era, we have the opportunity to disembark the conventional as all stability is gone." (Armstrong 2020)17

16 SourceSpy91 “Death Stranding – Full Game Walkthrough - No Commentary”, YouTube video 17 Rachel Armstrong "Lecture at KU Leuven" Online Zoom Presentation

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AVOID EXTINCTION Any life-like creature or robot must have a resilient ability to explore territory and reinvent themselves in order to not become redundant.

Table of Figures: Fig.1-3 and 5.: Elseth, Lars Erik. “The Porter Project”, Semester 8th, Studio 2B: Computational Building Development, Aarhus Arkitektskolen, Aarhus, Spring Semester, 2020 Fig.4.: Pertigkiozoglou, Eliza. “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics”, Medium, February 19, 2017. https://medium.com/designscience/1969-ab2783c47cbf

Bibliography: Arkitektskolen, A. “Academic Regulations for the Master of Arts in Architecture”, PDF file, p.4, 2019. https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/aarchdk/wp-content/ uploads/2019/09/05121511/Academic-Regulations-2019-MA.pdf

Armstrong, Rachel. "Lecture at KU Leuven", Online Zoom Presentation, KU Leuven Faculteit Architectuur Campussen Sint-Lucas, April 5, 2020.

Carpo, Mario. “Big Data and the End of History”, Perspecta. The Yale Architectural Journal 48: Amnesia. Mass.: MIT Press, p. 46-59, 2015

Conway, John. “Game of Life”, Cellular automata, 1970

Corner, James. “The Agency of Mapping”, essay in Mappings, edited by Cosgrove, D. Reaktion Books, 1999

Elseth, Lars Erik. “The Porter Project”, Semester 8th, Studio 2B: Computational Building Development, Aarhus Arkitektskolen, Aarhus, Spring Semester, 2020.

Goldberger, Paul. “Paul Rudolph’s Manhattan Megastructure”, New York Times, November 8, 2010. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/paulrudolphs-manhattan-megastructure

Fisher, Saul. “Philosophy and the Tradition of Architectural Theory”, Stanford University, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/architecture/tradition.html

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Johns, St. “Anti-Building for the Future: The World of Cedric Price”, St. Johns College, University of Cambridge, 2014. https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/anti-building-futureworld-cedric-price

SourceSpy91. “Death Stranding – Full Game Walkthrough - No Commentary”, YouTube video, 01:02:54:13. December 18, 2019. https://youtu.be/2_p9wLMNOeM

Teyssot, Georges. “Prosthetics and Parasites”, A Topology of Everyday Constellations. Mass.: MIT Press, Ch. 7, p. 219-251, 2003

Vashakmadze, Shota. “Cedric Price: Uncertain Variability”, Georgia Tech School of Architecture, 2014. https://cargocollective.com/InfamousLines/Cedric-Price

Vincent, James. “Welcome to the Warehouse of the Future”, Verge, May 8, 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/8/17331250/automated-warehouses-jobsocado-andover-amazon

Zbikowski, Conrad. “Lime Quietly Raises Prices on Scooter Rentals”, Streets, Minnesota, 2019.https://streets.mn/2019/08/06/lime-quietly-raises-prices-onscooter-rentals/

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