Fun Palace - Indeterminate Adaptable Design

The design allowed for active user reconfigurability and was designed to facilitate this. Its appearence is solely based upon allowing for change and adaptability.
“Choose what you want to do - or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting - or just lie back and stare at the sky.”
For a detailed paper see The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture - Stanley Matthews, Journal of Architectural Education, PP39-48, 2006.

A Responsive Public Space

Members of Newcastle Council engaging the public in pavement art on Northumberland Street. My project should seek to engage with this level of interaction with the public.

The Project: - Approaching the Brief

The process of an interaction map is needed in addition to the accommodation schedule to relate the uses and interactive opportunities to the physical form. The development of the architecture needs to stem from this in preference to the accommodation schedule as interaction, involvement and response are the building’s intents and purpose.

Yona Friedman declared that architects designed systems not buildings and this building is the system. The design process for this building through the mapping of different mechanisms of response and feedback to the Idea Store’s requirements opens up new notions of experiencing the built environment.

This project requires a different approach to the design than a more traditional architectural project. I need to get my hands dirty with exploring interactive ideas and possibilities applied to the brief and use the site and context as ways to reign the design in. (We're going to need a bigger boat... or a less conventional approrach)

Coming soon... The Brief in detail....

The Project: - Literature/Theory/Ideas #1

Tristan d’Estrée Sterk – Office for Robotic Architecture
Michael Fox – Dep. Architecture, California State Polytechnic and http://ibubbles.blogspot.com/
Maoworks – Office for Mediating Architecture and Objects
Robert R. Neumayr – Topotransegrity – Subzero (design as research)
A.i.b. org – LeisuratorTM – Architecture Intelligence, Rome, Italy
Ocean D
KINET – Computation and Design, Dep. of Architecture, MIT
Sensual Buildings, Arup – Jaap Wiedenhoff, Micheal Bingham & Rachel Harris - Paper at Game Set and Match 2
Hyperbody Research Group – Muscle Tower, Responsive Floor/Ceiling Units etc.
sixteen*(makers) – Kielder Residency Project (UCL)
www.interactivearchitecture.org
Architecture is Magic – Bartlett, UK

Friedman, Y. “Towards a Scientific Architecture”
1) Architects design systems not buildings
2) Feedback could be used as an architectural form
3) The profession of architecture must respond to the changes that surround its practice
(Friedman Y., Towards a Scientific Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass. 1975, pp1-4 - Taken from “Responsive Architecture: User-centred Interactions within the Hybridized Model of Control”)

The Project: - Intent

I am investigating how ideas prominent in Interactive and Responsive Architecture can be applied to a traditional architectural brief, in this case an Idea Store. Through investigating modes of interaction and response in different scales I intend to design a dynamic system capable of increased flexibility, environmental performance and active user participation. The goal of this project is to facilitate human interaction, response and enjoyment through building upon research and applications in media arts and technology focussing upon social practices. The design process will focus upon different modes of interaction and response applied to the Idea Store and will explore possibilities opened up through its site and brief in order to question the static notion of what we expect from our environments.

Coming Soon......

Coming soon... the "beef" of the project.

In the next week or so I will be preparing an fleshed out thesis proposal which I will begin working on as term starts. I promise more pictures and less blurb talking around the work and more actual content. Actually beginning the design process will be a great catalyst for more work too!