architecture goes wild doc

Users experience the real and the virtual at the same time as parallel worlds.. The animate body displays real time behaviour, Fresh data is always aiculating its values in relation to

Architecture Goes Wild

Thies one

UM 00

187 -KZF-ERTY

First we need that body Not your human body, but that product body While conceiving that body in weightless 3-D space, we are

joing to shape it We stretch, twist and scale that body We are

developing a client-specific body style During the design process the product body transforms along its growth path The body is subject to a_multiplicity of vectors, Multiple forces are working upon it from the

outside and from within That vectorial body is a unibody with structural

integrity ILis described by variable sections connecting together

eries of reference points This body has only one detail for top, right,

left and bottom The body-splines are set by the formula and a series

of subsequent parameters That body then needs a skin Both an

exterior skin and_an interior skin The construction is the adjustable

spacer between exterior and interior skin A seamless skin is wrapped

around the body Doors are THIẾT of the skin Wins

warp holes where the exterior skin folds back into the interior skin

The unibody lands smoothly on the local skin of the earth after having exchanged data regarding their properties Body-skin m lanet-

skin The product body is a spacecraft feeding upon data from its

local and global site During its life cycle we will feed that body with fresh data from weather stations, the Internet and from direct input

by users, The users trigger sensors to play with the light and sound massage The body becomes an instrumental playstation

and gradually transforms into a push-and-pull medium

Virtual worlds are a direct extension of real worlds Users experience the real and the virtual at the same time as parallel worlds

Architecture becomes animated and as unpredictable as the weather

The animate body displays real time behaviour, Fresh data is always

aiculating its values in relation to neighbouring data Swarms of real

tim ita are the (lockini rameters inside the computer scripts

These formulas are building the emotional factor of that in real

time That building body finally goes wild.

round Zero

January, 3

United Nations world peace convention

needs conference space

February, a winter mist on Valentine's Day

Macy’s has pumped up a substantial volume for Valentine’

Ground Zao

June, an unexpected rainy day

028 ‘Ground Zero

Ground Zero for WTC 911 exhibition in Max Protetch Gallery, New York, January 2002 Project team: Kas Oosterhuis, lona Léndrd, Michael Bittermann, Michaela Tomaselli, Chris Kievid

01

029

‘The war in Afghanistan took more lives than the attack on the WTC Why

do most people fee! differently about the death toll in Afghanistan than they do about the sudden destruction of the WTC and 3000 citizens? Ave some kilings more just than others? Are the winners always those who kill the most people? if you examine crime movies you will find out that the

‘good guys are always licenced to kill many bad guys Is that why the US had to kill more Afghans and Saudis than there were citizens killed on 911? Come on America, wake up and find a way to take revenge in a more intel- ligent way Don't waste our precious time on the easy slaughtering of poor-

ly armed people Let's face it, everybody was fascinated by the 911 event

‘veryone was thilled to watch it on television aver and over again, Only the most disciplined individuals were able to resist watching,

Destroying things is naturally much easier than synthesizing them How

‘can we architects appeal to people's fascinations by building things? My proposal for Ground Zero is to erect a structure that lives in a permanent state of crisis A structure that resides in a process of permanent destruc- tion and immediate healing of its wounds Think of the Borg Cube space vessels that are able to spontaneously reconstruct themselves after up to 70% destruction The WTC 911 episode was a highly concrete act of science fiction, with a much stronger effect than the hijackers must have imagined in their wildest dreams Virtual SF concepts are most applicable indeed to the real world here and now Our proposal for Ground Zero is an

‘openly programmable architecture of selt-executing emotional states that

is fully adjustable in shape and content

‘We propose the concept of an e-motive architecture that would be without precedent This concept would have an impact equivalent in a positive way to the 911 collapse This e-motive architecture would be ready to adjust to different cultural structures and events and able to adapt to a rich variety of uses Our e-buildings not only respond to dif fering circumstances but actively propose new configurations This architecture would propagate both commercial and non-profit content, this o-

02 'Yes We Build Spaceships 2002

Kas Oosterhuis interviewed by Cindy, a virtual friend Kas ~ Yes, we build spaceships

Cindy Spaceships? But you'r an architect!

In 1994 we made a building for processing garbage in the Twente region, This service building we designed as a spaceship making a soft landing

at the site, The spaceship was fis! thought out and modelled in zero-aravin jallal space It then transmitted signals, so to speak, to the site to say it was on its way The site replied with something along the lines of all ight,

ul dont former fm a bit soft on ist get a sturdy bed organized, The site then passed on all the data necessary for the spaceship to make

a successful landing, bed and all

Since then we've made many more spaceships which have landed at

‘numerous sites across the planet, or were intended to land somewhere successfully One of the most recent is our design for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art for Brisbane in Australia This spaceship exists as a 3-D model and as a presentation on our server, but unfortunately it's not been able to make contact with the authorities in Brisbane Deep in the spaceship we've planned an interactive protospace, a space where the public can be fully immersed in a virtual world, A genuine holodeck

say you design spaceships do you

n to say thal you yourself are a sort of

alien, a creature fer space? Where are

your spaceships built Kas?

We are space travellers on earth, what we do is deliberately assemble the unknown We want to surprise our audience, we want to show what we can

do with the current resources here and now We also want to surprise our- selves in the design process In 1990 llona Léndrd and | held a series of workshops entitled Artifical Intuition Our motto was and stil is: We must train our intuition to direct our logic

Yes, we build sculptures

Sculptures? But a sculpture isn't a building!

‘A building can be a sculpture and a sculpture can function wonderfully

as a bullding At ONL our work is informed by the notion of electronically fusing art and architecture In 1994 we organized the Sculpture City pro- Ject, where we used digital techniques to carry out the entire process from design to execution We designed everything with the computer, modelled

it all in 3-D and rendered the animations, and then made the maquettes ~ the Clouds series — with the milling robot from the industrial Design department at the TU Delft An implicit factor in the Sculpture City concept

is that when art and architecture join forces this must happen at the same scale, and artist and architect have to work with equal budgets In other words, not your one per cent for art in and around the building, but a one- to-one relationship, on equal footing,

‘Some years later we were able to put this concept into practice when designing and building the Waterpavilion There we expanded our team with the composers Edwin van der Heide and Victor Wentinck The Saltwaterpavilion is a building with real-time behaviour, feeding as it does

on the unprocessed data delivered to it in a continuous flow by a weather station mounted on a buoy in the North Sea

We build concrete science fiction

‘Science fiction? But science fiction is one

thing you can't build, | mean science fiction

{mt teal! Surely you can only do that in your

‘mind?

For my final-year project at the TU Delft in 1980 | launched my principle

of concrete sclence fiction | wanted to show that if you can describe a

‘scheme in concrete terms you can realize it in practice too My proposal was to have a legislative strip 5 km wide and 250 km long float above the Netherlands, cut

9 clear across all the major traffic arteries and rivers

082

And WIC 911? What about

that concrete science fiction?

‘Yes We Build Spaceships

Ithung ike a kind of sword of Damocies above the Netherlands Ihe idea

\was that legislation, besides being a binding fou =ihe form ol the law So one of my laws was to declare an aesthetic control-ree zone in the shadow of the strip The government commission overseeing the visual decency of buildings would then have no jurisdiction Within this tautly defined area The upshot of this measure would be that, fon crossing the border into this strip of land the world would look com pletely different, as though you had driven into another country An im- portant factor is that the form of the law fails to coincide with a municipal

Cr national border, but has the form that fits the idea So its the idea that fixes form and content, not the prevailing poltical circumstances All power to the imagination

an unshakeable faith in assembling things that are beautiful and good if you want to combat a network like Bin Laden's, the way | see it you can

How do you think we should deal with the

‘new techniques and the new media?

| suspect that we humans will have to evolve step by step in a most profound collaboration with technique Digital life may well assimilate us

‘completely in the end, so that we no longer need pretend that we are the be-all and end-all of evolution, Alior us ner form:

develop that will reach much further into the micro and macro universes than we with our physical limitations could ever do And not just that, think those new life-forms are already evolving and that without knowing it

we are devotedly adding to their evolution Sitting at my computer with the data flowing, | myself am facilitating this digital lite 'm providing a little sustenance for the globally distributed network of collaborating com- puters | may still feel my computer is doing more or less what | want it to

do, but the opposite is every bit as true | can only do things with the com- puter that the hardware and software allow me to do | live in a no-strings- attached, peaceful co-existence with my computers

‘And yes, we build dream machines

086 ‘Yes We Bulld Spaceships

ob of North-Holland, 2002 |

Dream machines? What do you mean by

dream machine? Surely a dream is more

like vital realty How can you build it as

a machine?

As | see it, virtual reality is more real than what we normally understand

by reality We know all about even the tiniest particle of virtual reality We know exactly how the hardware works, and how the software makes its way through the integrated circuits Virtual reality is more a kind of hyper- reality And in our work, we seek to have reality and this hyperreality col- laborate in real time Buildings and built environments are becoming programmable Form and substance can both be driven An interactive relationship will effortlessly grow between the users and the built environ-

‘ment, in the way that users and smart appliances are beginning to com- municate now Buildings will develop into a smart swarm of building parts

in contact with each other and with their users All building elements will then know each others’ position and influence each other in real time

‘Compare this with the behaviour of birds in a swarm A few simple rules programmed into the birds themselves see to it that they don't fly too close to one another, but also that the swarm remains a single entity

037

Birds are always in motion Our real time dream machine works this way too: users and theit environment are the members of the swarm, they are always in motion All the time, building parts and users are taking account

of one another Reality and virtual hyperreality melt together into a new world of experience

Who do you build your dream machines for?

Who is your audience? And who is the client?

We build for people who have learn to play, For children for whom it is natural

‘to move effortlessly between reality and imagination And for people with an

‘open prospect of the future, for those who have not forgotten how to play

ur clients are those who see that society is changing into an experience economy which will then further develop into a transformation economy

‘These entrepreneurs see that there can be a lot of pleasure and a lot of

‘money in this They produce plans for interactive dream machines to give their public an experience and to transform them; to play with them the game

of programmable e-motive architecture

You build spaceships that are sculptures at

the same time, and even dream machines in

a concrete form of science fiction, It seems

{as though you two really enjoy your work

Damn right we do

038 E-motive Architecture

03 E-motive Architecture 2001

Inaugural speech delivered on November 7th 2001 on receiving the chair

of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology

Virtual Friend - Rector Magnificus, members of

the Board, fellow professors and other members

of the universiarian community highly

esteemed listeners, ladies and gentlemen,

3 lean back, relax and get ready for

‘en heren, maakt u zich gereed voor e-motive architecture

Hey Kaas, ust look at you, what

‘my partner, visual artist lona Lénérd, while | myself am in charge of

‘ONL_architecture and ONL_media For the faculty | have launched the Hyperbody Research Group, one of whose aims isto actively position our a8 on intuitive, immediate rel ime architecture in the international archi- tectural discourse,

dings are information processing vehich

Hey Kaas, what are you saying, is a building

‘some sort of machine?

According to my working definition, a building is a set of fixed and moving components, a totality giving form and substance to the flow of information ppassing through it The moving parts are the doors, windows, switches, Actually the doors are switches too, they are either on or off, open or closed When they are open they let through information, when closed the flow of information is obstructed

What sort of information are you referring to?

‘'m talking about information in whatever guise: image, text, the spoken word, electricity, water, gas, commodities, air light Every form of information ha its own carrier, People convey spoken language, books convey the printed word, television conveys images, tubes and ducts convey gas, air and light Information is continually on the move, information is ike a package with no fixed residence or place of belonging Buildings absorb the incoming infor-

‘mation, process that information and release it in another form Buildings hhave their own form of metabolism

C851

Ns

So Kaas, what you are actually saying right here

and now is that a building is a sơn of body?

‘Yes, buildings are bodies, buildings are building bodies with a head, a trunk and a tail such as the Elhorst-Vioedbelt garbagetransferstation | built in

‘1995 This building is a rubbish-sorting machine Here | have regarded waste matter as a particular form of information: it's weighed, recorded, sorted,

‘stored, fltered, cleaned The building gets this process in order while the building's architecture communicates the process internally and externally

‘So that the architecture can itself be regarded as an information-processing vehicle, an input-output device