DRL II

Architecture & Urbanism (DRL PHASE 2)

This year the DRL concluded the first year of its new design research agenda, titled Behavioural Complexity, which builds on the scenario- and material-based research outcomes of its predecessor, Proto-Design. The work investigates architecture as an instrument of interaction in which social scenarios are coupled with material behaviour and life cycles that aim to open up speculative questions about how we live and the role that architecture can actively play. 

To achieve this, behavioural, parametric and generative methodologies of computational design are combined with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic and reflexive feedback systems. The result is the development of new forms of spatial organisation containing adaptive characteristics that are not type- or site-dependent but tested within scenarios of evolving ecologies and environments with the aim of developing novel design proposals concerned with the everyday. 

The iterative methodologies of the studio focus on investigations of spatial, structural and material organisation, engaging in contemporary discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. 

Possibilities of Behavioural Complexity are explored in four parallel research studios. Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Behavioural Agency, explores mobility as a driver for a hybrid infrastructural scenario of autonomous spatial machines as urban prototypes. Semiological Crowds, led by Patrik Schumacher, focuses on the design of parametric prototypes that intelligently vary general topological schemata across a wide range of parametrically specifiable site conditions, such as a campus. Robert Stuart-Smith’s studio, Behavioural Production, explores ideas of autonomy and organisation through the architectural production of matter, energy and information via its event-driven agency in relation to people, machines and the internet. Shajay Bhooshan’s studio, Synthetic Equilibria, explores two avenues of research and knowledge: empirical learning via prototyping of spaces and objects at a human scale and scientific learning through methods and technology from the computer graphics industry.