Crisis Modes : Protocols + Future Ecologies | NYC | 20090817-20090821
Michael Chen + Jason Lee [Crisis Fronts], & Ronnie Parsons + Gil Akos [Studio Mode | modeLab]

Crisis Modes is a one-week intensive design workshop to be held in New York City from August 17-21.

The workshop will take place in a studio setting and will be devoted to exploring relational design strategies and digital design methodologies for speculative infrastructures. New York City, with its breadth of ecological and urban complexity and in particular its urbanizing industrialized waterways, will be the primary context explored.

The aim of the workshop will be to empower designers to negotiate the complex and data-rich environments that are available through professional mapping and information systems and to develop speculative design proposals through the use of computational techniques and methodologies. Participants will develop design interventions that address emerging ecological crises and opportunities found in New York ecologies of the present and near-future.

The format of the workshop will include daily intensive workshop sessions focusing primarily on Grasshopper, Rhino’s parametric design plug-in, and evening lectures and presentations from practitioners and experts in the fields of sustainability and computational design. The workshop will cover strategic workflows for data set analysis and mapping, complex rule-based geometries, as well as techniques for digital fabrication.

The workshop will culminate in a public exhibition and opening event on the evening of Friday, August 21.

Crisis Modes is a one-week intensive design workshop to be held in New York City from August 17-21. More information is available on modeLab.

Crisis Fronts 2.0 Studio | Pratt Institute | 2009Spring
Michael Chen and Jason Lee with Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons

Crisis Fronts is the Degree Project studio and seminar run by Michael Chen and Jason Lee, with Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

Crisis Fronts is an ongoing inquiry into contemporary global crises that suggest new demands and agendas for architecture, and the potential afforded by parametric and generative digital design tools to engage them.

CRISIS FRONTS :: Cognitive Infrastructures

2008 marks an important milestone as the year when for the first time in history the majority of the world’s population will reside in urban areas. An explosion in urban growth is underway, most notably in the developing world where the urban population is expected to double by 2030.

Cities are already the sites of rapid cultural change and they are the primary economic and cultural engines of societies. An increasingly globalized and urban world is at once inevitable and it is also necessary. This urban world produces its own forms of diversity, innovation, and intelligence, but the unprecedented growth of cities worldwide is not without challenges. The extraordinary scale and speed of urban growth already exceeds the capacity of the systems that would service, support, and manage it. Much of this growth will take place beyond the legal and administrative boundary of the city proper, uninhibited by centralized planning or management, and in absence of an adequate set of municipal infrastructures.

The decentralized growth of the city – that which takes place in patches, on the periphery, self- regulated, and remote from central administrative control – is the site of extraordinary volatility and undergoes a constant process of transformation. Current forms of infrastructure are outdated before they are even completed and remain fixed in the scale and possess neither the speed nor the flexibility and responsiveness that would enable feedback between them and the growth of the city. They are no longer adequate. The failure of infrastructure will be an enormous factor in the increase of worldwide poverty, hunger, disease, overcrowding, and instability. New, more intelligent infrastructures and new understandings and readings of urban infrastructures will have to be invented – ones that have the potential to engage changing forms of organization, operative processes, and generative logics found in the contemporary city.

Of particular relevance are the areas of the city that are the fastest growing, the most contested, the most fragile, and the least served by conventional infrastructures like energy, clean water, and transportation. These are areas that grow following logics of extreme pragmatism and efficiency on a granular level, that are self organizing and self regulating, and that will require new tools and systems of intelligence to comprehend and negotiate. At issue is the development of a fundamentally different view of infrastructure, but also of systems of intelligence, memory and cognition.

Cognition refers not only to the acquisition of information and data, but to its processing, and its culmination in action. Research in the studio will focus on the underlying structure or logic that enables cognition and also on approaches to introduce new forms of cognition into the city.

Cognitive Infrastructures are poly-scalar, working across intensity, quality, and a range of relationships that exist at the scale of architectural components and assemblies at one extreme and urban and infrastructural scales and effects at another. They are dynamic formations of data, material, and services. They include physical formations and also practices that acquire an infrastructural scale. They are organizational and responsive, and must be engaged in continual feedback with their environments.

Work in the studio will concentrate on developing specific rules and models for cognition through computational research in Rhinoscript. Projects in the studio will be conceived of not as envelopes or scaffolds, but as cognitive techno-ecologies: nimble and responsive to their environment, taking advantage of new and future technologies, and employing the feedback between inputs, processing, and action that are the characteristics of all cognitive systems. They seek to identify and actively augment the performance of the opportunistic programs and patterns of use that will emerge around them. These patterns are understood to comprise a complex social feedback system and will afford the opportunity for speculation on new forms of material intelligence, formal innovation, new social practices, institutions, leisure, commerce, and piracy.

CrisisFronts Website

Crisis Fronts 1.0 Studio | Pratt Institute | 2008Spring
Michael Chen + Jason Lee with Gil Akos + Ronnie Parsons

Crisis Fronts is the Degree Project studio and seminar run by Michael Chen and Jason Lee, with Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

By many accounts buildings account for more energy consumption and contribute more to global climate change than transportation and industry combined. The impending climate crisis will bring significant changes in natural systems worldwide ranging from coastal flooding, desertification, widespread loss of biodiversity, disease, drought, fire, and extreme weather events. While current efforts to control carbon emissions reduce energy consumption, and increase efficiency of manufacturing and agricultural practices will contribute to slowing the rate of global warming, temperatures will continue to rise until more radical measures are undertaken at a significant scale.

Global warming directs our attention to the climate but also to architecture. Considering the built environment’s prominent contribution to planetary warming, systems and phenomena such as weather can no longer be considered to be exclusively “natural”. The previously accepted binary of artificial and natural requires a different set of exchanges. Human activity, and particularly the measures to enclose, illuminate, and condition that activity, to transport and control it reinforce a direct linkage between human settlement and climatic change. Projected further into the future, architecture and weather may no longer be simply distinguishable from one another and architecture must be equipped to perform as its own environmental system, reinforcing rather than denying its capacity to enter into a dynamic exchange of energies with the climate. Such a meteorological approach has the potential to redefine the material, organizational, programmatic, and performative dimensions of architecture.

Situating the work of the studio in the context of climate change is to acknowledge the preeminence of the front as a condition of particular interest and one that has both architectural and meteorological implications. Rapid shifting boundaries between land and water, cultivation and wasteland are not only the most immediate and obvious indications of the extent of the climate crisis but fluxual regions of turbulence and non linear behavior. That these boundary fronts are typically the site of extreme economic disparity, contested exchange between public and private territories, and the site of programmatic and technological innovation arising from necessity will require a more broadly considered, more radical environmentalism that embraces and exploits the full range of complexity that emerges within the region of frontal flux.

Architectures negotiating the dynamic front must embrace a greater term of longevity and must simultaneously navigate the extremes of a nomadic climactic, a changing contextual environment, and a contingent occupation. Projects in the studio will be conceived of not as envelopes or scaffolds, but as climactic techno-ecologies unto themselves, capable of navigating and withstanding the extremes of frontal migration, taking advantage of new and future technologies with potentials to mitigate the underlying factors contributing to global warming, and actively augmenting the performance of the opportunistic programs and patterns that will emerge. These patterns are understood to comprise a complex social feedback system and will afford the opportunity for speculation on new forms of material intelligence, formal innovation, new social practice, institutions, leisure, commerce, and piracy.

In this context, currently existing consumer-based and product-oriented approaches to “green” architecture are insufficient to adequately confront the full range of complexity posed by the climate crisis and its effects. Similarly, discrete and purely localized technical approaches to mechanical systems or energy production must also be reconsidered, as do any of the contemporary approaches that deal exclusively with a static or fixed climatic and territorial context. A more radical and speculative approach will be necessary.

Collaborative Research
Students conduct research in collaborative teams on a series of climate crisis topics including desertification, coastal and storm flooding, and polar melt. Additionally each team selects a series of performative precedents for study in the form of technical components and emerging technologies and materials relevant to their selected crisis front.

Methodology
Projects in the studio are conceived of as intelligent and responsive structures and begin with a study of material computation in the form of iterative and algorithmic modeling techniques to test the relationship between geometry and technical performance in the selected technical precedents. These performative ranges are further explored digitally, first representationally, and then algorithmically through scripting in Rhinoceros. The algorithms constitute a particular form of intelligence as well as a specific morphogenetic logic. Particular emphasis has been placed on developing a highly precise understanding and control of the behavior, emergent tendencies, and of the performative attributes of each geometrical system. The studio is situated with the intent to explore the potential at the intersection of computation and sustainability.

CrisisFronts Website