Cybernetic Insurgence I – Urban Autopoietics

Andrew Yau and Jonas Lundberg

Diploma 16 will continue to develop alternative methods of architectural production and urban models based on cybernetics and adaptation to our rapidly changing environment. This year our research emanates from the production of new carbon-neutral cities striving for a homeostasis between nature, technology and people. We will speculate on the design and culture and BIOME-specific zero-carbon model cities such as the Masdar City development by Foster + Partners. Our aim to develop alternative forms of urban morphologies, spatial imagination and methods of construction in pursuit of a post-Cartesian architecture. We will attempt to address the design challenges that these urban projects present by exploiting associated information and phenomena in both a parallel and iterative manner, exploring the innate opportunities afforded by generative and associative modelling techniques and digital manufacturing.

Diploma 16 will reinvent vernacular types and construction methods – and reclaim a new sensibility in architectural craftsmanship – using emerging types of generative, material and production processes. We will define an epistemology of ecological stoichiometry for new city design through the specific deployment of computational design tools. The year will start the year with a series of computational workshops in associative modelling systems from which we will define an analytical ecosystem model for a specific BIOME. A series of generative modelling workshops will develop an Autopoietic Machine, a drawing maching compositing vernacular and natural processes with digital generation and production. The Autopoietic Machine will be the basis of a series of workshops in digital fabrication leading to the design and fabrication of a large-scale prototype influenced by an industry-specific composite production process. Each student will develop a BIOME-specific urban manifesto and formal research abstract in order to relate the project to a larger cultural context.

The anticipated project outcome is a co-evolving manifestation of a new-built city and specific architectural production processes as an urban autopoietics intended to produce a meaningful level of complexity, public urban domain, architectural form and spatial sensibility setting ground-breaking energy and carbon targets. We anticipate speculative, innovative and novel urban and architectural proposals manifested in a clear material and tectonic form. Projecting from the experimental practice of selfgovernance design, Diploma 16 seeks to use rapidly changing global environmental, economy and cultural conditions as a springboard for imaginative collaborative production models and visionary tectonics that will help nurture innovation and design culture in cities emerging from our new forms of green economy.

Unit Staff

Andrew Yau and Jonas Lundberg (winner of the RIBA tutor of the year prize in 2003) are members of Urban Future Organization, an international architecture practice and design research collaborative.

UFO has won a number of international competitions, exhibited its work at the Venice and Beijing Biennales and was recently featured in 10X10 v. 2.

They are currently working on large-scale urban and architectural projects in the Far East.