Living Systems - An emergent digital methodology for conceptual residential design

Abstract

This thesis explores the implications of a digital design process based on multi agent systems on conceptual residential design. The process of form finding uses multi agent systems to express social systems, with the intent of exploring alternate formal, spatial and organizational possibilities for residential architecture. The work speculates on the architecture that would arise as a physical manifestation of these systems, the way that form in nature is derived from logical processes based on function and environmental interaction. In this sense, computational tools facilitate an emergent or bottom-up design method – form arises as the result of a system and process. The design exercise was therefore more the design of the process and system than the design of an object.

The outcome is a highly speculative scheme for housing which radically re-interprets traditional residential typologies – i.e the apartment, the terraced house, the detached house. Organic forms are clustered together in unique organizations on site. Each pod, and each cluster, is unique – the result of internal parameters, interactions with neighbouring agents, and physical forces acting during the simulation. Wellington City in 100 years’ time, facing extreme sea level rise, is set as a pertinent backdrop to these emergent forms. The design intent is to provoke thought on the resilience of the existing city fabric through a disruption of its geometric language; a parasitic intrusion into the existing structures. Without the ground plane for circulation via roads and footpaths, the existing urban fabric is not functional- an apt scenario in which to speculate on what an alternate urban form of the future could be.