Emergent Form

1.1Emergent Form-definition and purpose

Looking at the definition of emergent form we can find it related to all different kinds of fields and sciences, from computation to design biology and mathematics.

Emergent phenomena are the result of interactions between elements of a system over time, often being unexpected results of simple interactions between simple components. An emergent property or behavior is shown when a number of simple agents operate in an environment, forming complex behaviors as a system, that the things themselves do not have. For instance, consider water (H₂0): hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) are extremely light gaseous substances at room temperature, while water, the effect of their combination, is a heavy liquid. Liquidity is therefore one of the emergent properties of the system of hydrogen/oxygen. There is nothing about the property of liquidity- its wetness, hydraulic dynamics, Brownian motion, and potential for heat exchange- that can be predicted by examining the properties of either H or O.

When it comes to architecture, such kind of processes are used to create forms based on structural pattern formation and emergent behavior. This way of production is part of a larger contemporary movement in architecture referred to by Detlef Mertins in 2004 as ‘Bioconstructivism’, where biology, mathematics, and engineering combine to produce an architecture characterized by its variability and performance. This is not something unknown in nature of course. Nature is filled with variation and complexity that architecture has only started to explore. There are differences between architecture and biology as in nature it is all about iteration, mutation, and feedback through fitness testing, in order to produce both elegant and durable species and formations, but it is exactly the study of the process of random mutation and natural selection in nature that provides a model for how a dynamic feedback between excesses and efficiencies can create innovation and elegance in design process.

Another part of this research is called Biomimicry, also known as Bionics. By that we mean the use of methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology. The transfer of technology between life forms and synthetic constructs is desirable because evolutionary pressure typically forces natural systems to become highly efficient as well as formally elegant. Biomimetics can be relavent to architecture in terms of design, systems, and processes and can refer to both morphological and behavioral characteristics.

1.2 Tools

These kind of generative processes are carried out through the use of evolutionary algorithms. The regeneration of complex formal and behavioral patterns exhibited by organisms in the laboratory have been enabled by non-linear dynamics and computation using both generative and analytical algorithms and design techniques. Such algorithms have been applied to an ever increasing variety of design domains, for which they have achieved human competitive results on small design problems. In order to improve the applicability of such systems, fundamental research must be undertaken to discover how to construct increasingly more sophisticated designs. Many different design tools and software have been developed during the past years in aid of this study. A great proportion of them are the outcome of the research carried out in the Emergent Design Group of MIT, such as Gener8, Weaver, Agency, germZ and Moss. Also one can find the widely used Top Solid and Generative Components, and other ones such as Rhinoscript, Max script, Mel scripting, Perl and Processing.

One of the most commonly used software is GENR8. Genr8 is a plug-in for Alias/WavefrontMonday, December 3, 2007s 3D design tool Maya and it was developed by the Emergent Design Group at MIT in 2001. The Emergent Design Group was an interdisciplinary group that developed new ideas in architecture by bringing together researchers in Artificial Intelligence and architects. The purpose of this innovative surface design tool was to provide architects with access to creative surface design by giving them influence over generative processes. As they explain, a generative process is the activity of iteratively executing some encoding that creates and then modifies an artifact. So, during creating this tool they chose the thing that was most intriguing and of use to architects, which is modeling cellular growth interacting with an environment. GENR8 is an design tool that combines many different kinds of powerful growth languages with evolutionary search. The software combines 3D map L-systems that are extended to an abstract physical environment with Grammatical Evolution. Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) typically adapt 'on-line' but GENR8 is designed to accommodate the back and forth control exchange between user and tool during on-line evolutionary adaptation. Users may interrupt, intervene and then resume GENR8. This allows for interactive design evaluation and computational multi-criteria search. The investigative software is written in C++ as a plug-in to Alias|Wavefront Maya.The technical power beneath GENR8 has more than one implications: evolutionary search and HEMLS (Hemberg Extended Map L-Systems). A HEMLS, the generative process, is interpreted by GENR8 to generate a surface. GENR8 uses evolutionary search to discover its own HEMLS that adaptively evolve towards surfaces with features the user has specified.

Mel Scripting on the other hand is a Maya Embedded scripting language that is used to simplify tasks in Autodesk's 3D Graphics Software Maya. Through Mel one can achieve most tasks that can be done through Maya's GUI, as well as certain other that GUI doesn’t offer. MEL gives the opportunity to accelerate complicated or repetitive tasks and it also allows users to redistribute a specific set of commands with others.

2.1 Emergent Form Practitioners

The people that are behind much of this research are not only researching form its self but all of the social economic and environmentally conscious branches of emergent culture that are part of what is emerging from the newly possible fields of practice in engineering, building technology and construction. Peter Testa, Tom Wescombe and Martin Hemberg are just some of the architects/engineers/computer programmers/economists/etc. that are starting to drive this part of architecture that is being called emergent.

Peter Testa is a researcher in the field of emergent design, not only as part of the emergent design group but as a practicing architect. Currently he is working on a carbon skin, solid state tower that would be the lightest and strongest building of its type. This building is currently more of a design theory rather than an actual design proposal at this point but potentially has the ability to create a shift in the way that building technology and material manufacturing is currently recognized and used. He is proposing that this building could be completely manufactured on site with essentially the use of two materials and the robots to actually do the construction. This process would entail the use of wood, which is readily available from renewable forests and carbon fiber, which would be quite expensive (but less so in this process) and he claims that the high costs of carbon fiber would be offset enough by the use of wood and the manufacturing process to make this project not only feasible but cheap in comparison to a similar building constructed using traditional building techniques. This process is described as having robots on site which essentially lay in wood and weave/cure an interwoven surface of carbon fiber over the wood, similar to the way that a hockey stick or a ladder is made. This practice would be cheap, efficient and most of all environmentally friendly.

Martin hemberg is a bioengineer and scientist interested in the organization of biological systems. He has recently published a paper on the properties of scholastic genetic oscillators in which the chemical master equation is used as a starting point in an investigation into the difference in a time series between the chemical master equation and the stochastic differential equation. Martin Hemberg is essentially the architect who designed the program GENR8 as his masters thesis at the imperial college of London in association with MIT and the architectural association this program is based on the ideals of evolving plant structures and behaves as if it were growing a surface that strives for optimization an efficiency, similar to a plant. This type of thinking and this type of influence has rarely been seen in the past as part of the architecture and building community. This view on architecture has the potential and seems to be heading in the direction of creating the possibility for super efficient, strong and lightweight building skins. Plus the idea that this type of system will not only be seen in radical and rare buildings but in and increasing number of buildings that are more along the lines of an average project.

Tom Wescombe in a way is combining the ideas of both Hemberg and Testa and implementing them in a more technical engineering based approach which utilizes the type of research that hemberg dose with the implementation more similar to that of Testa. He has developed a computer program that can look at the various forces acting on a system and can reduce the system to be the most efficient yet stable system possible. This results in unique unconventional systems that would be impossible to produce without the advent of computer aided manufacturing. He bases his theory around the idea of emergence its self(the name of his firm as well as the name of is theory) that with the sum of many parts there can be a whole that would otherwise have been impossible. This theory also revolves around the idea of bioengineering and the discovery of the mathematical systems put in place that are able to create the forms that are only found in nature(for now).

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/emergentDesign/genr8/index.html

http://projects.csail.mit.edu/emergentDesign/genr8/hemberg_chap8.pdf