mélange
Chicago Architecture Biennial Kiosk 2015
phase : concept design competition
design firm : mæta design llc
client : Chicago Architecture Biennial Kiosk 2015
location : Chicago, Illinois
Mélange* creates a profound new look into the potential to see architecture as a dynamic space that elicits action and emergent growth. It creates a condition, that allows for the landscape to infiltrate and merge with the structure. Mélange also investigates the boundaries of an interior picturesque, one that would attract a visitor through highly calculated framed of perspectives. Its informal and bizarre form is in a state of growth, part jungle and part architecture as it emerges from the landscape of the park. The lakefront kiosk becomes an apparatus for viewing the lake and the city and through numerous dynamic perspectives that re-frames our perception of the urban condition.
This is a shift from imposing our will/intention on, or within, the systems of computation, to
embracing the dissolution of the binary distinction of the intuitive and systemic. While
computational design seeks to embed intuition into the self-organizing algorithms of complexity
theory, this is being superseded by the emergence of a computational intuition – ‘what kind of
subjectivity the heuristic bits dreams ?’ Rather than computational architecture’s attempt to shift
from invention to pseudo-orchestration, this shift/glitch questions the subjective/objective division
established between architect its technological matrix. Is this a symptom of a wider blurring of
digital/material, robot/human, emergence/intuition, process/artefact, where these participants all
interact on the same plane, rather than considering the robot as either the slave of savior, or vice
versa?
s of high definition.
Our proposal explores heterotopic aspects of architectural space in an
attempt to displace its inherent anthropocentric conceptual bias. Historically,
the space of the Garden is a hybrid gradient of public and private, a territorial
buffer that interfaces with the commons and the environment. The Garden
acts as a design space for the care, metabolism and aesthetics of a variety
of species with various degrees of domestication. The project operates
under the conceptual framework for space as a form-of-life itself: Open and
adaptive to change over time, the Garden is an archetypal diagram of a
network open to ecological, cultural and economic feedback mechanisms.
The design of the proposal builds upon the research of our studio in
robotically prefabricated biocomposite modular elements with embedded
micro-processors. The modularity of the proposal will allow for multiple
variations and the partial reconfigurability of the pavilion, as well as its final
disassembly. The building parts can have a second life after 2024 as small
assemblies that continue to support their plant life. Over time the two
systems - organic and inorganic – will merge into a single ecology. Fibrous
structures, complex nets with embedded processors and positioned in
larger assemblies, will attempt to map spatial and temporal patterns and speculate on the computational infrastructure that would allow for real-time
sensing and processing of the data of the Garden.