Output details
16 - Architecture, Built Environment and Planning
University of Greenwich
AVATAR: Design Research into the Future of Architecture (portfolio) 2008-13
The author and the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) Group has been instrumental, for the last 10 years, in exploring the ramifications for architecture and design due to the exponential growth of computing capability and emerging biotechnologies.
Research Questions:
1. How big is the terrain that architecture might inhabit in the twenty-first century and where is its edges.
It is the author’s contention contemporary technology enables architecture to exist at all scales.
2. How can we talk and describe this vast space of potential for architecture?
The author believes that the 21st century is constituted by the relationship things have across space. It is the embroidering of these relationships both ecologically and virtually that makes architectural space.
3. What can be achieved, within this terrain, by numerous collaborators- architects, artists, designers and scientists?
AVATAR has numerous collaborators and works across interdisciplinary boundaries from pioneers in Unconventional Computing to large corporations such as Unilever.
4. What skills might the twenty first century architect need?
The traditional skills of architects need to be augmented by a working knowledge of emergent systems, open ended systems, computational epistemologies and a working knowledge of Biology, Botany and Ethics is important.
5. What types of Design Research can we do?
We should not prescribe what experiments and speculations are relevant to Design Research. The terrain is evolving swiftly and what might be appropriate will change equally swiftly
6. Is Synthetic Biology part of the architecture of the future?
Much of the research concerns protocells. Protocells are more akin to bubbles in liquid than biological cells. We can make them deposit skins, attract them or repel them from light or dark, chemically refuel them, get them to follow chemical pathways.
The research outputs are predicated on these ideas.
