ARCH 672 - PROPOSITIONS
FALL 2024PROJECTS
Julia Bohlen - Wastescape - Full Circle
Farah Ossaimee - The Negotiation
Negotiating the City
This studio is an introduction to urban simulation as a design tool. The course will be both technical and theoretical, connecting notions of programming and simulation with the nature of computer modeling and ecological perspectives towards non-human agents. The studio will provide a series of technical tutorials for developing simulations within the Unity3D game engine environment, inviting students to collaborate to develop an interactive urban simulation game.
The study of complex adaptive systems in architecture has been characterized through a shift toward formalism, in which simulations of flocks and swarms become techniques for complex geometrical modeling. Such approaches fail to harness the opportunity of developing an ecological awareness around the possible interactions between systems within a design domain. The simulation of ecologies relies on key concepts such as feedback loops and interdependence between actors. Such actors can be identified as both humans and non-humans. An object-oriented framework enables each actor to establish interactions with other actors without a hierarchy.
The simulation of an ecosystem requires defining agents as species and their interactions within an environment. As a design class, this course will expand the notion of species to include the built environment. By modeling interactions between digital entities, it is possible to give rise to emergent phenomena: intelligence as collective behaviors that might be considered unexpected from the behavior of an individual agent but arise once certain informational thresholds are crossed.
This studio provides the theoretical foundations to understand complex phenomena by modeling networks of interactions inviting students to design models that operate as ecologies.