Digital Morphogenesis

Mass GIS based customisation in Grasshopper

WPA2 : Local Code / Real Estates is a project by Nicholas de Monchaux that utilises GIS data to identify abandoned sites, and Grasshopper to design a custom urban space for each site. 150 sites in total.  With that many designs, even easy tasks like making a render becomes difficult: turning layers on an off in Grasshopper, sending each version to Illustrator and saving the image to become a single frame in the movie. But while the project shows of some dexterous file management skills, I still have some reservations about the architectural worth of this project:

My first concern is with what constitutes site in this project. Like in many digital projects, site has been reduced to the quantifiable parameters: solar incidence, wind direction, demographics and geometric data. This data driven, hyper-local approach leads to an erasure of context, as described by Francesca Hughes in AD 79:

“‘Context’ in the culture of parametric production returns, or is reinstalled, already digitalised, and edited to the bone: typically as a set of three to five measurable, and thus necessarily quantitative, physical parameters (latitude, wind direction, and typical rush-hour capacity, say). Once optimised, these parameters effectively ‘contextualise’ the system or proposal, argue that it is inthe right place at the right time. That is, context returns as a highly abstracted, carefully selected alibi. Architects have always, necessarily, artfully reduced context to harness it as a generator and justifier of action. This is nothing new.What is new is that with parametric systems this reductive process from the outset excludes any indeterminate or qualitative content –ironically such parameters are usually the more site-specific ones.”

With some much of the context excluded in Local Code : Real Estates, it is worth considering how responsive the designs actually are. Whilst they are geometrically unique, they have a universal, almost modernist, unity to them that denies context. Even in the renders context has been reduced to data – white geometric planes – with no indication of the inhabitants reacting to the lee wind planting necessitated by the data to reduce their energy consumption.

My second concern is the way the design is produced in Grasshopper. The code seems to use a rule based algorithm: place trees on the south side if there is no wind. The problem with this approach is that design can not be expressed in a formal logic. As Manual De Landa puts it in his 1993 essay “Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason”:

“[early artificial intelligence] researchers explicitly put symbols (labels, rules, recipes) and symbol-manipulating skills into the computer. When it was realized that logic alone was not enough to manipulate these symbols in a significantly “intelligent” way, they began to extract the rules of thumb, tricks of the trade and other non-formal heuristic knowledge from human experts, and put these into the machine but also as fully formed symbolic structures. ”

In this situation, the computer un-intelligently executes rules  on behalf of the architect who takes little responsibility for the results. It is a flawed method that finds neither the optimum or the apt-imum.

Both of these concerns might be answered with a “wait for the next revision,” a reply that has been given by various architects for decades. Sure, now with Moore’s Law we can produce hundreds more designs, much faster, but the fundamental problems of digital architecture remain: site is just data and design is just rules. I wish I could remember who asked “are we there yet?” but I suspect there have been quite a few. Local Code : Real Estates demonstrates that once we get there this technology will scale easily, but Local Code : Real Estates makes no progress towards getting us there.

Full project details

via ::alexwebb

UPDATE 17-02-2010:

I have a few details of this project wrong, so thank you to Nicholas de Monchaux for emailing me with a few further details. These designs are not intended to be built, like I assumed in my ‘First Concern,’ but rather act as an armature for public discussion. At about 3:30 minutes into the first video you can see people using the Berkeley Opinion software to comment on their local design.  This of course brings up issues of public design, which have been endlessly discussed elsewhere. However what I find exciting about this proposal is how closely it relates to the Wikipedia bots, which were originally used to produce articles about cities from GIS and census data (that looked like this) these machine created entries could then be edited by individuals in the community to make them more relevant. Like the Wikipedia bots, I wonder if there is potential to open up a GIS API and let anyone develop a bot to populate these vacant sites. The bots would each design for the thousands of sites and the citizens would be free to pick and choose parts of each design that they liked. Such a system would not free us from the problem, identified by Francesca Hughes, of designing from data but the system might inspire us to move beyond the currently employed rule based design. (A bit like the Net Flicks Prize)