Designers long have dreamed of buildings that behave like living things. Frank Lloyd Wright defined “organic architecture” as “building the way nature builds.” In 1963, Archigram envisioned a “Living City”—community as organism. And now the Cascadia Green Building Council has issued a Living Building Challenge as the next stage of evolution toward “true sustainability.” The challenge: “Imagine a building designed and constructed to operate as elegantly and efficiently as a flower.”
But how does a flower grow? It might be time to shift the conversation from product to process. What if buildings could be created in the same way a cell develops into a plant —from the bottom up instead of the top down? Technology may point the way. Automated processes are changing every aspect of design and construction, and it's only a matter of time before self-assembly completely takes over.
Already, automation has proven itself at the back end of production. Rapid prototyping and digital fabrication are liberating every design discipline at small scales. At larger scales, such as automobiles and airplanes, computerized production has lowered costs, saved time, increased quality and consistency, and significantly reduced waste and emissions. Applied to architecture, mechanical precision minimizes site disturbance and produces the most energy-efficient structures available. During an economic boom in the early '90s, Japan invested heavily in robotic construction technology and found it consistently cut construction time by a third and labor and waste by half. So why hasn't automation become more popular in the building trades worldwide?
Who says robots can't be creative? Meet the RAP-Robotic Action Painter-invented by Portuguese artist Leonel Moura. Residing at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the RAP makes original ink drawings, complete with a signature. Turn the page to see an example.
Credit: Leonal Moura
“The only thing stopping architecture from picking up these techniques,” says A. Scott Howe, an architect and senior systems engineer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “is the added time it takes to create standard interfaces and rule-based design grammars.” He believes that eventually all the infrastructure for putting together a building will be absorbed by the building itself. “There will come a day,” says Howe, “when no human labor is present on any construction site.”
What Howe calls “rule-based design grammars” could transform the front end of the design process as well. Simulation techniques such as advanced thermal modeling and computational fluid dynamics have improved environmental performance by simulating the heat, air, water, stress, and strain in and around buildings. Typically such tools are used to evaluate design, but soon they will become common methods for creating design. Parametric modeling software such as CATIA, Rhino, and Bentley's new GenerativeComponents product already have the ability to update geometry automatically according to preset variables. Users can establish clear performance criteria and optimization routines for a building's systems, structure, and envelope, then generate forms that are highly responsive to context, climate, and materials. Is it such a leap to think that this could happen without a designer's hand?
Portuguese artist Leonel Moura combines artificial intelligence and robotics to make “nonhuman art.” At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, his Robotic Action Painter (RAP) follows statistical standards of composition and color to make original ink drawings, complete with a signature. Moura also has written algorithms to generate architectural forms by mimicking the emergent behavior of ant colonies.
The Brookline, Mass.–based team of designer-engineer Ira Spool and artist Anna Tsypin created an Automated Architecture Robot that can carve a unique 1:50 scale model out of a block of ice—a cybernetic igloo. The robot was shown in 2003 at ArtBots, an annual robot talent show. (This year's ArtBots takes place in Dublin, Ireland, Sept. 19–21; visit artbots.org.) Spool and Tsypin call automatic design “the ultimate direction of architectural advancement.”
And the work of New York–based architectural designers Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch often uses algorithmic techniques to produce new geometries based on natural processes. At The Museum of Modern Art's “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit, which closes this month, their Rules of Six follows automated rules to emulate the growth patterns of nanostructures.
Moura feels the deterrent to automatic design is not technology but mindset. “To accept robot creations as artistic expression means to deny humans the exclusiveness of creativity, and many people are not willing to do this.” Designers may balk at the thought of giving up creative license, but replacing the napkin sketch with an algorithm might be the key to “building the way nature builds,” as Wright fantasized.
With its own kind of DNA, could architecture be grown instead of built? Already, sensors embedded in a building's structure can measure vibrations and trigger actuators to temper the material and avoid damage. This kind of smart feedback can inform the next generation of design, much like biological evolution. Computer programs have reproduced virtually every trait we associate with life. When design follows suit, the results could be good for buildings and the environment but put architects and builders out of their jobs—unless they, too, evolve.
Lance Hosey is a director with William McDonough + Partners.