after the meltdown::re-texturing the wetline
Columbia University
GSAPP AdvancedStudioV Fall2006
Design Critic: Alisa Andrasek
TA: Ezio Blasetti


If Greenland melted or broke up and slipped into the sea… sea levels worldwide would increase by between 18 and 20 feet. In Beijing more than 20 million people would have to be evacuated, in Shanghai area more than 40 million people would be forced to move, in Calcutta and Bangladesh 60 million, in Manhattan the site of the WTC Memorial would be underwater.
from "An Incovenient Truth" by Al Gore

wetlines:: host conditions
Our capacity to engage with complexity will be challenged by siting this studio in the context of a global ice meltdown. More specifically, we will look into different degrees of flooding as projected by the melting of Greenland and the effect that will have on various coastal regions as sea levels rise worldwide, with increases ranging from 18 to 20 feet. What we will refer to as wetlines, coastal conditions transformed by elevated sea levels due to ice melting, will be tested through specific 'host conditions' (conventionally referred to as 'sites').
Suggested wetline zones_
zone 001: Manhattan's sinking grid
zone 002: Greenland's melting icescape
zone 003: New Orleans levies zone
zone 004: "dead" ocean zones with changed chemistry _ algae and coral blooms //

For decades, environmentalist movements have warned about the danger of global warming with very little success. Their approach has typically been along the lines of radical anti-consumerism, anticapitalism, and anti-technology, pointing out problems without necessarily providing appealing solutions capable of reaching a wider audience or even the primary agents contributing to the problem. For architecture and the construction industry (which happens to be one of the main sources of pollution) this form of environmentalism came to be known as 'sustainability,' which was often relegated to the engineering fields and corporate architectural practice. More recently, with the topic of global warming emerging as a mainstream issue in both political and cultural circles, especially given the emergence of increasingly extreme global weather conditions resulting in enormous setbacks for the insurance industry and the economies of many countries worldwide, these environmental concerns have gained new momentum, this time armed with progressive arguments which incorporate technology as a main resource for producing creative solutions.
www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/green.html

In the material sciences, as it relates to this larger context of environmentalism, the integration of digital processes of invention and production have yet to be an adequately explored territory by architects. So far it has been the engineering fields which have expressed the most interest in and concern for this area of work, concentrating on areas of innovation at both micro and macro scales and in very specific ways through increasing levels of technological expertise, while architects tend to remain preoccupied with a more traditional generalist's approach, reaching for the "middle" scale.

As a response to this, our studio will employ instruments of computation as a means of generating highly specific yet projective trials and errors towards new forms of design innovation. In this way we will approach what has been for architecture a traditionally 'unappealing' trajectory of research, that is a move away from generalism towards a more focused and specific set of investigations. The wetline is a proposal for an adaptive life-form, a kind of coastline system which transitions between hard and soft elements (such as land and water) and in the process works to absorb and process various scales of ecological as well as cultural force. It is in essence a membrane system characterized by intensive filtering and variable porosity, capable of negotiating shifting territories and providing new opportunities for reprogramming existing forms of connectivity.

As a means of approaching this general condition of the wetline, we will begin with a series of precedent studies, investigating a number of systems found in the natural environment such as marshes, wetlands, and archipelagos, each of which negotiate the distribution of liquids, land, and life in novel and complex ways. We will also look at a number of artificial examples such as large-scale land-tech systems like GIS as well as various micro-scale lab experiments, all of which have been applied in ways that retexture the distribution patterns of forests, deserts, swamps and other natural ecosystems, effectively re-programming organic systems through the introduction of non-organic technological filters. Likewise one might consider global industries of farming, greenhouses, and even tourism, all of which harness the shifting natural features of our environment with increasing accuracy.

Additionally, we'll be learning from simulations in physics and the algorithmic logics found in plant growth, both of which exhibit non-linear differentiation and redundancy as alternatives to the more deterministic optimization models found in typical building structures. We'll study the weirdness of probabilistic logics in quantum mechanics and computing, in part as an alternative approach to issues of program(ming), as well as various dynamical models such as chemical convection patterns and probabilistic distributions of behavioral tendencies within a given system (as a means to derive behavioral models at various scales within ecological systems). Finally, science-fiction will inspire the speculative aspects of forecasting possible futures for our emerging wetlines.

wetlines::intuitive programming
Self-organization is the ability of a system or life-form to reshuffle its internal consistency and respond to its host territory. The statistical propagation of possible events supports the unstable fitness of current inhabitation cultures and proposes rising waters and shifting grounds. In the current socio-economic atmosphere, distributed and creative forms of network intelligence increasingly display emergent behaviors, demonstrating life-like activity for which no simple cause and effect relation can be attributed. Concurrently, it offers highly emergent 'products' inseparable from the multiplicity that creates those products, pervasive in that it recreates that very multiplicity.

We will look at a series of precedents for what might inform the programmatic aspects of a 'wetline.' This might include large-scale land/water texturing systems incorporating ecological and cultural conditions at a variety of scales, an entirely new form of urbanism as found with El Ejido in South Spain. With its 'plasticulture urbanism, ' in which technological and cultural systems converge in the production of an enormously complex geo-political zone, El Ejido generates shifts and cracks in existing borders, re-meshing new relationships between African and European coastlines.

precedent studies:
_El Ejido Spain hi-tech greenhouses _ plasticulture urbanism
_7 km market Odessa Ukraine _ XXL emergent black market
_open sea traveling fish farms
www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/fish.html

emergent composure…
"Composition is less a critical thought project than an integrally experienced emergence. It is a creative event." Brian Massumi

Following these various precedent studies, we will embark on the design and development of new wetline infrastructures (or 'textures'), with the general ambition of testing them as large and small-scale design proposals for the various flooded coastline host sites (or 'environments') mentioned previously. As a means of designing these new wetline systems, our work will draw upon a genetically engineered library of seeds for the incubation of new types of generative gardens (a "garden" conceived here as an abstract zone or field of conditions conducive to various forms of growth). To this extent, our architectural systems or textures (our wetlines) will be understood as new life-forms, bred with the intention of their eventual integration into existing ecological and cultural systems.

Increasing access to processes of computation as well as new forms of material praxis will comprise a composite approach to design in which the 'invisible' retextures the 'visible.' The constraints found in material systems as well as the various modes of production which process and structure that material, become opportunities for positive input in the design process. As a result, the actual features of material computation have the effect of being encoded into the parametrics of computational geometry, ultimately stretching the boundaries of performance and invention. Taking a programming approach to generating design, we will move away from pre-coded tools to a set of more general and conceptual computational systems. As opposed to individuations as subject or form, design will be understood instead as a form of genetic inscription. The parallel reality of an invisible code becomes the common ground for multiple actualizations.

Employing design strategies invested in methods of material computation, and by extension issues of complexity and multiplicity, 'top-down' actions do not necessarily disappear, but rather transform from a 'master plan' configuration to what we might call a processual consistency, in other words, from rigid instrumentalities to dynamically relational assemblages.

Embracing systemic investigation in order to form a series of design instruments (our own generative and analytical tools for material accumulation and performative simulation) we will practice the formation of little orders: patterns measured not by molar means but programmed as synchronicities, a probabilistic series of events. As a result, programmatic and material patterns in this process occur in a co-dependent manner. By setting up a relationship between local stimulus and global response, any given material system negotiates various scales of actualization while simultaneously preserving its material and geometric behaviors. The consistency of emerging patterns is not locatable. A series of textured materialities meet one another in a codetermining process of being made. While negotiating an undulating ground of criteria-meeting-potential, architecture can be seen as inseparable from this depth of complex relationality, to the extent that the totality of the compositional event acquires a life-of-its-own.

As a result, this studio will introduce methods of associative parametric design embodied in scripted routines for the generation of polyscalar systems. By using software associatively we will be modeling relationships as a composite of design intuition, programming, and parametric limits particular to certain material set-ups and fabrication processes. Students will work on developing a series of iterative, non-linear geometric behaviors, effectively designing their own tools. Geometric transformations will be linked to material and fabrication constraints, allowing for a synthetic computing of the various systems involved. Previous exposure to MEL and Rhino scripting is highly recommended, as well as previous experience with associative parametric modeling such as Generative Components .

suggested research:
_bio-remediation
_programmable filtration
_artificial photosynthesis
_phase change materials
_biocircuits//biobricks
_genetic cross-breeding in laboratories
_organic/inorganic composites
_synthetic life
_sensors, transducers, actuators…
_distributed robotics (beyond mechanics _ towards new life-forms)
_biomimetics
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readings_ sample_
_Sanford Kwinter, "Hydraulic Vision," in the Mood River catalog, Wexner Center for the Arts, 2002
_Steven Johnson, "Introduction," "Street Level," and excerpts from "Pattern Match" and "See What Happens," from Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, Scribner, 2001
_Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines ++ The Singularity is Near
_Derrick De Kerckhove, The skin of culture
_Brian Mussumi, Parables for the Virtual, Strange Horizon: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic, p177, Duke Uviversity Press, 2002
_Phillip Ball, The Self-Made Tapestry ++ Critical Mass
_Eugene Thacker, Biomedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
_Alexander Galloway, Protocol _ how control exists after decentralization, The MIT Press 2004
_AD_Emergence: Morphogenetic Design Strategies ++ AD_Techniques and Technologies in Morphogenetic Design, by Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Michael Weinstock, editors
_Mark Buchanan _ Ubiquity, Small worlds
_Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Introduction: A Musico-Logical Offering," from Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Vintage, 1979
_Sanford Kwinter, "African Genesis," in Assemblage36, MIT Press, 1998
_ John Holland, Hidden order, Emergence
_Gilles Deleuze, "Sixteenth Series of the Static Ontological Genesis," from The Logic of Sense, Columbia, 1990
_Gregory Bateson, Ecology of Mind
_The Invisibles, New X-Men by Grant Morrison
_Henry Bergson, Introduction to "Matter and Memory"
_J. L. Borges, stories from Labyrinths
_Keller Easterling, "El Ejido," in Enduring Innocence, MIT Press, 2005
_Kobo Abe, The Woman in the Dunes, Vintage International, 1991
_Steven Wolfram, NKS
_David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality
_RUR, Atlas of Novel Tectonics
_Greg Egan, Diaspora
_Neil Stephenson, Snow Crash
_Stanislav Lem, Solaris