Figure 1. San Jose State University Museum of Art, and Design Silicon Valley, California, Competition Entry, Worms-eye view, 2003.

5. Nothing Is Random: Automason Ver 2.0

“The ruin mentality appears frivolous, fixated on surface not substance. It is in fact deeply pessimistic, counting more ancestors than descendents, sure without thinking that it inhabits a decadent phase.�

Robert Harbison, “The Built, The Unbuilt and the Unbuildable�1

While computers have dramatically changed the way architects design, construction in the US and around the world is still dependent on a diverse mix of labor intensive processes employing both traditional and nontraditional materials. Instead of focusing exclusively on the digital fabrication of building components in the factory, this essay explores the creation of proprietary software designed to effect meaningful changes in the way work is produced in the field. Enhancing the efficiency and formal potential of conventional building techniques in the present requires an expanded definition of computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM). For this purpose Automason Ver 1.0 was developed around the analogous operation of cellular automaton programs and masonry construction.

A cellular automaton (CA) program consists of a field of discrete cells (on or off, transparent or opaque, white or black) divided into small groups, or neighborhoods. The configuration of each neighborhood is used to determine the future state of the next generation of cells. Both complex and uniform patterns emerge from the ground up in a network of parts generated by local interactions. The idea of using simple programs to drive the construction of bricks-and-mortar structures comes from the observation that masons work much like cellular automaton programs. By following procedures based on laws of adjacency and iteration, a mason builds by stacking one brick at a time. With a simple set of rules, complex brick patterns can be constructed without reference to an equally complicated index of parts: construction documents, shop drawings, and so on. In fact, cellular automata can facilitate the production of extremely difficult designs without forcing the mason to do more work i.e. “building without drawings.� An automasonry wall’s 2 expressive power is the direct result of its parts and the way they are assembled. This follows one of the guiding principles of Modernism, but with a difference: structures driven by simple programs need not be reduced to a limited inventory of pared-down, predetermined or ideal types. (A brick does not only want to be an arch.) The best way to know how a given rule will behave is to set it in motion.

Figure 2. Five Cellular automaton computations showing complex patters generated from simple rules, 2003.

With simple programs, building details obtain their complexity for free: no external agency or extraneous system is needed to design them. (This kind of complexity is not dependent on the incessant differentiation of parts, but on the application of fixed rules in a discrete system that requires only two components.) The overall form of a CA masonry structure must therefore be evaluated in terms of its relationship to specific building requirements interpreted and organized by the architect. Here, Darwin’s theory of evolution falls short as a practical model for design. Rather than linking environmental pressures with blind chance to produce morphogenic variation, in an automasonry structure, functional constraints are used to willfully select self-organizing patterns that are particular to the rigorous, computational properties of a specific material. (Architecture is the intersection of desire, computation, function and matter.)

A Museum For San Jose

“Q: Do you work mostly with your own programs?�

“A: I write software…this is the political aspect of my work…we need to take the computer back from the large developers that control the tools most artists use…�

Golan Levin in conversation with RES Magazine1

For the San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design competition (2003), a ‘class two’ CA code 4 was used to produce both complex and simple patterns from strait courses of stone and glass block. Rooms with windows and galleries requiring large, blank display walls were laid out in accordance with the competition brief. Once these parameters were set in place a search was made through multiple iterations in order to find the most appropriate patterns. For the museum’s exterior, internal subdivisions and fire stairs, a five-cell outer totalistic 3 cellular automaton was found which damped out the complexity of the lower floors to create a partly windowless volume with intricate openings at the base. (The top of the building is terminated by skylights that draw the sun into a narrow atrium facing east.)

Figure 3. Three diagrams showing structural framework variations in relationship to changing brick and glass block veneer patterns. Automason Ver 1.0 calculates beam depths between columns positioned according to the initial conditions of a given Cellular Automaton code. 2005.

From the complexity of the lower levels, the project culminates in a quiescent and illuminated void. Vertical supports for the building’s interior spaces were determine by the initial conditions of the CA code on the ground floor. A non-regular grid of columns produced different spans with beams of varying depths setting up an exchange between light, gravity and computation. Rather than being neutral infill, the project’s surfaces actively shape an internal concrete armature that rhythmically fluctuates as the CA patterns ascend into space. The parametric relationship between enclosing walls and structure constitutes both the organizational logic of Automason Ver 1.0 (written in C++) and the tectonic interconnections forged by the project during construction. Here in its making, architecture itself is computed. (The building’s surfaces are not a product of some external image concealing structure, nor are they shaped by a remote database or calculating machine.) In the San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design, the nature and position of each masonry unit affects its immediate neighbors and the order of the whole. Because the system is extremely sensitive to small changes, every brick counts in a truly organic architecture created by the rigorous application of simple programs.

Figure 4. View of atrium showing concrete frame and automasonry walls, San Jose State University Museum of Art and Design, San Jose, California, Competition Entry, 2003

The design and organization of the San Jose project also express its code’s ability to efficiently produce irregular patterns that are organically linked to blank, homogeneous space. These relationships are produced using local rules that are not based on the recursion of simple motifs, faithfully rendered at different scales (self-similarity). No image of the whole can be found in the details. Neither scale invariance nor the repetition of a standard module can be used to guide the mason’s work. While the code for a completed wall can be ascertained through direct observation, the rules on their own give little indication of the kinds of forms they can produce. Sameness and variation, periodicity and aperiodicity are therefore binaries that accentuate the morphological potential of simple programs.

These computational strategies open up architecture to new ways of thinking and are useful as an alternative to one of contemporary design’s most pervasive motifs. The ability to integrate different functions and internal space requirements without resorting to antagonistic compositional strategies has traditionally been the purpose of ‘folding’ in architecture. The work of Rene Thom is often used in this context to connect opposing forces on a single, deformed surface. While Thom’s catastrophe diagrams are used mostly as a device to exceed the operative limits of collage, an abrupt change in the condition of a system or the integration of contradictory space requirements does not necessarily mandate compositional strategies based on an infinitely divisible logic. Discrete operations can be equally effective in generating networked relationships between distinct elements. The fold as a leitmotif for contemporary practice (Eisenman, Gehry, et al) requires ‘a continuous variation of matter’. 4 The architectural effects of the fold can be matched by the iteration of programs like cellular automata where simple codes resolve the dynamic and often conflicting demands of function. The following categories, linked to their current formal expression, now give way to a new set of procedures:

Bifurcation————————-Folding/Deformation————————-Simple Programs
Affiliation—————————Smoothness/Continuity————————-Discrete Space
Differentiation———————Mass Customization———————Complexity for Free
Variation—————————-Self-Similarity —————————————A periodicity
Fabrication————————-Robotics(CAD/CAM)———————–Augmented Craft

Ornament, Entropy and the Picturesque

For the 19th-century architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, ornament was indispensable. As a medium it could exceed function and morphological necessity transforming utilitarian constructions into great works of art. Semper therefore insisted that a building’s structure and material weight should be concealed behind the ‘dissimulating fabric’ of decoration. This fabric was in turn used to signify the meaning and formal origins of architecture which he believed had evolved from more primitive techniques such as weaving, pottery and metalwork. (A woven pattern rendered in stone for example could actively link the genealogy of a simple wall to the rich history of textile design.) In many ways Semper’s idea of applied decoration presages Robert Venturi’s concept of the decorated shed, where signs and

Figure 5. The plan of San Jose is based on a five-cell grid. The building’s vertical circulation core is indicated by 3 consecutive black squares (far right). There are three looped walls in the project. The initial conditions for each CA loop also designates column locations for the building’s concrete frame.

symbols are simply attached to raw functional structures. In contrast to Semper and Venturi, Frank Lloyd Wright’s theory of ornament encouraged the development of integral patterns arising naturally from a building’s physical structure. For Louis Sullivan and John Root, Wright’s early mentors, decorative motifs were a special means of expression that reinforced the primary facts of function and assembly. All of theses ideas were, of course, negated by the European Modernists who pushed for the total elimination of ornament.

While the patterned surfaces of San Jose are not themselves a product of organizing principles governed by structural necessity, they are also not applied decoration. In the process of unbuilding complexity, class two cellular automata visibly drive the organization of structure and space. Far from a simplicity achieved through the removal of intricate details, blank homogeneous surfaces emerge spontaneously out of heterogeneous patterns that negate themselves. Literally, ornament self-organizes its own disappearance. This approach escapes the narrow dialectic that pits formal excess on the one hand against a strict return to minimal forms on the other. Two distinct systems, masonry veneer and reinforced concrete, are here clearly integrated without having to blur or confuse the boundaries between them.

While the results look as if architecture was being subject to decay, this is not a design signifying the uncontroled disruption of function and structural integrity: at San Jose form is the result of a code that actively unbuilds the complexity of the project’s lower floors to produce a series of closed spaces. The brick walls of SITE’s Best Department store in Houston, Texas (1974) form a mock ruin by copying an image or picture external to the materials and techniques that produced it. The brick walls of San Jose are self-organized into what looks like a ruin by following a generative process internal to the materials and techniques of building construction. The former is a film-still folly, an intentionally provocative simulation of entropy. Its strangeness is predicated on the contradictory tension between movement and stasis, consumerism and death, (shoppers menaced by a picturesque simulation of falling bricks) while the latter is a process moving incrementally towards increasing levels of ineffability and emptiness. (One critiques function through irony, the other produces an instrumental transition that is both organic and real.) Through long rectangular openings located above its blank surfaces the museum reaches into a vast and unfabricated silence. The vertical progression from intricate fenestration to solid walls is ultimately a move beyond glass and stone, complexity and minimalism, ornament and structure, usefulness and obsolescence, shadows and light, 0’s and 1’s. At the roof all dualities come to an end.

Conclusion:

Cellular automata facilitate the construction of complex details. Ornament is no longer a contrivance or afterthought. Rather it is integral to the making of architecture. The organic patterns in San Jose effortlessly disappear into an emptiness of their own creation-a ruin in reverse. Ornaments energy is aloud to effortlessly exhaust its own presence without privileging structural necessity as a dominant motivation for architecture. The duality of ornament vs. structure is exhausted.

Notes

1. Robert Habrison from “The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable�, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p-105.
2. An ‘automasonry wall’ is a wall made with simple programs.
3 For a detailed description of the classification system for cellular automaton programs, see: Stephen Wolfram, ‘Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata’, Cellular Automata and Complexity: Collected Papers, Westview Press (Philadelphia), 1995, pp 140–57. A class two pattern starts out complex and ends up simple.
4 ‘Outer totalistic’ is a shorthand format for specifying cellular automaton rules.
1 Golan Levin, ‘High-Bandwidth Magic Show�, Interview RES Magazine, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2006.
5 Peter Eisenman, ‘Visions unfolding’, Zone: Incorporations v. 6, Sanford Kwinter and Jonathan Cary (ed), Zone Books, Brooklyn, New York, 1992, p 234.
6. Nonstandard, a-periodic automasonry patterns are more meaningful, architecturally, than ones that are fractal like or modular. This is true because a self-similar motif can be repeated over and over again. A more complex code that breaks this kind of modular repetition would require an external index of part-to-whole or part-to-part relationships (shop drawings) that would demand more effort on the part of the craftsman. If the mason has a series of fixed rules repeatedly applied locally, i.e. a cellular automaton program, then this index becomes unnecessary and the mason’s workload decreases. So there is a direct relationship between a-periodicity as a formal idea and the actual process of bodies staking bricks. This is both a question of expression and practicality. How do you maximize complexity in form while minimizing energy and effort? The automasonry program was applied to the San Jose Museum Competition as a way of demonstrating a simple idea: increased complexity with decreased effort means that nothing in the system is contrived or capricious.

by Michael Silver

Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
JAC

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