METHODOLOGY

Cybernetics

The altered environmental conditions of today can no longer be mastered with the architectural resources of the past..

Frei Otto

For the dynamic and extreme environment conditions like in desert, traditional architecture lacks agency, as conditions and landscape formations cannot be predicted and solution cannot be planned, not to say lack of accessibility and infrastructure. The only way of having architecture there, is to construct not with already preplanned solution but in the exact moment in time according to the exact conditions of the environment. Architecture must be done immediately according to specific rules, but not blueprints. Simply stated, what we are evolving are the rules for generating form, rather than the forms themselves. We are describing processes, not components; ours is the packet-of-seeds as opposed to the bag-of-bricks approach.1

The use and harnessing of nature as a form of technology are vital to the research and core design methodology. To achieve such lofty goals, the proposal of the project is in the deployment of high populations of machinic agents on-site whose agency is central to the thesis: the fuse of sand into the glass for purposes of creating structures capable of diffusing and deflecting the expanding desert away from populated areas and living ecosystem. For such a system, cybernetic concepts became central to the overall integrity of the agenda at hand.

Two types of relationships were employed, the first being a machine-to-machine relationship as a strategy of communication between localised agents on a grander global scale. This was achieved through the implementation of stigmergic behaviours such as those found in ant colonies. Thus, like ants who indicate information on directions towards a food source or back home to the colony through pheromones, the glass structures would like-wise convey information for agents on where their target locations are and where to fuse sand into glass. The agents have the necessary sensors for communication with each other and to sense the landscape and manufactured structures to behave accordingly.

Another cybernetic relationship is more unusual as it commands the conveying on-site conditions in real-time, that is, a machine-to-nature relationship, which attempts for the machine to learn from the site and its conditions whilst the natural landscape in return would react to the conditions of the structures generated by the deployed machines. This strategy unfolds through the use of real-time data sensing technology in the agents, however, more importantly, it is expressed in how agents respond to on-site conditions and vice-versa, how the dynamic landscape reacts to the glass structures infused on site.