CITA Complex Modelling

By Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen

CITA Complex Modelling investigates the infrastructures of architectural design models. By questioning the tools for integrating information across the expanded digital design chain, the book asks how to support feedback between different scales of design engagement moving from material design, across design, simulation and analysis to specification and fabrication. The book conveys the findings of the Complex Modelling research project a five-year framing project supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark. Undertaken at CITA, the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Complex Modelling asks how new interdisciplinary methods for adaptive parametrisation, advanced simulation, machine learning and robotic fabrication can be orchestrated within novel workflows that expand the agency of architecture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Riverside Architectural Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781988366371

Book preview

Cover_-_Updated_200114.jpg

Title: CITA Complex Modelling

Other Title: Complex Modelling

Authors: Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Martin Tamke, Paul Nicholas, Phil Ayres

Names: Ramsgaard Thomsen, Mette, 1969- author.

Graphic Design:

Yuliya Šinke Baranovskaya

Proof Reading:

Sandra Greig

Riverside Architectural Press:

Anne Paxton, Bianca Weeko Martin, Ellie Hayden, Muhammad Tahir Pervaiz, Philip Beesley

Published by Riverside Architectural Press.

www.riversidearchitecturalpress.com

First edition. Includes bibliographical references.

© 2020 Riverside Architectural Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission.

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright.

Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200179578 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210107928 | ISBN 9781988366272 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781988366371 (HTML)

Subject: LCSH: Architectural design—Computer simulation

Classification: LCC NA2728 .C58 2020 DDC 720.285—dc23

Contents

Foreward

MANIFESTO

THE COMPLETE MODEL

ADAPTIVE PARAMETRISATION

ACTIVATING INFORMATION THRESHOLDS IN MODEL NETWORKS

THE RISE

SOCIAL WEAVERS

INTEGRATING ANALYSIS

HYBRID

TOWER

ISOPORIA

MULTISCALE MODELLING

ROCKING THE CRADLE OF THE MECHANISTIC MODEL

STRESSED SKINS

COPPER CLAD

PHASE CHANGE MATERIAL FACADE

INFORMATION RICH DESIGN

ARCHITECTURE MACHINE LEARNING: DIVERSIFYING THE PRODUCTION OF PREDICTION

A BRIDGE TOO FAR

LACE WALL

LEARNING TO BE A VAULT

TOPOLOGICAL MODELLING

INFLATED RESTRAINT

ELEPHOETUS: RETHINKING PATTERNS

PERSPECTIVES

REFERENCES

PUBLICATIONS

PEOPLE

Foreward

This book conveys the findings of the Complex Modelling research project. Complex Modelling is a five-year framing project undertaken at CITA, the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. The project investigates the future of the architectural model in the age of advanced computation. By questioning the tools for integrating information across the expanded digital design chain, the project examines the infrastructures that underlie computational design. Complex Modelling asks how new interdisciplinary methods for adaptive parametrisation, advanced simulation, machine learning and robotic fabrication can be orchestrated within novel workflows that expand the agency of architecture.

Our aim for this book has been to support the many scientific contributions that Complex Modelling has produced, which have been published in the scientific journals and conferences of our community, through the provision of deeper design-based explanations of the underlying computational and material methods that ground the realisation of each project. As such, the book privileges the ‘how to’ of research and the maker-based inquisitiveness of design creation, and gives insight into the nature and depth of considerations incorporated into the bespoke workflows developed in each project. This perspective reveals the complex network of processes forming the projects, which merge design agency with analysis, simulation with prediction, parametrisation with open topological modelling and the practices of physical prototyping, fabrication testing and troubleshooting.

The book is structured around five central chapters: Adaptive parametrisation, Integrated analysis, Multi-scale modelling, Information-rich design and Topological modelling. These chapters recount the research and development of seven demonstrator projects, along with a series of speculative probes and prototypes that expand upon the research enquiry and test new methods. In this way, the five central contributions are expressed through both their conceptual framing and their practical methodologies. These contributions are contextualised by theoretical discussions and the presentation of a set of design speculations, smaller research that teases out research questions and probes the territories of enquiry.

Complex Modelling is a collaborative effort. Both within CITA, where it has engaged the full research centre, and through its manifold interdisciplinary collaborations, the project is made up of collective efforts exchanging knowledge between disciplines, knowledge cultures and methods. We are thankful to founding collaborations that supported the project proposal: Prof. Christoph Gengnagel, Chair of Structural Design and Technology, and his group at Berlin University of the Arts, especially Greg Quinn, Riccardo de la Magna and Michael Schmeck. Also, we thank Prof. Mark Pauly, Head of the Applied Geometry Group, Computer Graphics and Geometry Laboratory, EPFL, Switzerland. Throughout the course of the project, further academic and industry-based collaboration was formed. We extend our thanks to these many collaborators, including Billie Faircloth and Ryan Welsch of Kieran Timberlake, Philadelphia, USA; Danica Pistekova of the Academy of Fine Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia; Cecilie Søs Brandt-Olsen of the Technical University of Denmark and BIG Engineering; Sebastian Risi of the IT University of Copenhagen; Yordan Kyosev of the Hochschule Niederrhein; Raul Fangueiro of the University of Minho; Prof. Chris Hutchinson of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Monash University, Melbourne; Tim Schork of the University of Technology, Sydney; the Essener Labor fuer Leichte Flaechentragwerke, the University of Duisburg-Essen; DTU Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Aarhus School of Architecture. We also thank the many industry partners for their various contributions ranging from in-depth research collaboration to sponsorship. We thank Bollinger+Grohmann; HAL Robotics; SICK Sensor Intelligence Denmark; str.ucture GmbH; FLUKE PPH Consult A/S; Lindab A/S; TexMind UG; AFF – A. Ferreira & Filhos; Fibrenamics; DSM Dyneema B.V.; Geleen; Alurays GmbH, Munich, Germany; ZHA Code; and Craft Metals.

We would like to extend thanks to Prof. Mark Burry of Swinburne University, Melbourne and Prof. Klaus Bollinger of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria for both their contribution as part of the advisory board and their help in evaluating results during the research process.

Finally, we are thankful to the funding body that made the project possible. Complex Modelling has been formative in the maturing of CITA research. The project is a Sapere Aude Advanced Grant research project supported by The Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF). The grant was awarded to Prof. Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen and the project started in September 2013.

Prof. Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen

MANIFESTO

METTE RAMSGAARD THOMSEN

COMPLEX MODELLING

Contemporary building culture stands before radical changes to its practices and technologies as it struggles to respond to new requirements for energy efficiency, sustainability, and economic and societal change. As our societies are challenged by escalating urbanisation, coupled with the climate crisis, it is the role of the architect to create clever design solutions that enable better material use, higher energy conservation, and better social and urban programmes, while maintaining high architectural quality and cultural importance. The role of design is to develop customised solutions that engage the specific challenges of a given site, programme and environment. Until now, such creative inventiveness has been restricted by modern industrialised building culture. However, the increasing use of computational design strategies enables contemporary architectural design practice to develop new information-based design models that include environmental information, integrate analysis and bridge to fabrication. Here, modelling practices and infrastructures play a central role.

This book describes a joint research project examining the infrastructures of the future information model. Undertaken at CITA, Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, the Complex Modelling project both examines advanced modelling methodologies that challenge the disciplinary silos of building design practice and creates new interdisciplinary alliances. By building on the understanding that current representation-based architectural design methods are impeding design innovation, we investigate how advanced computation can radically transform material practice. With a focus on identifying the digital-material relations that lay the ground for real changes in the way in which we design and construct our buildings, our aim is to examine how the complex modelling of the digital design chain can fundamentally change design practice.

Complex Modelling focuses on the integration of material performance as a particular challenge to architectural design, opening up new horizons for design practice. The ability to design for and with material performance is understood as a core resource for design innovation that is closely tied to material optimisation. By understanding materials not as static or inanimate, but as engaged in complex behaviours and performances, new dimensions of design potential are unleashed, innovating structural thinking and creating better and more sustainable material usage. The coupling of computational design with advanced digital fabrication leads to a new perception of materials. Here, materials are understood as structural compositions that pertain to inherent sets of properties and dynamic behaviours. The theory of computational design and digital fabrication is that by formalising these properties and behaviours and devising means of representing their inherent complexity, we can access their underlying compositional logics and thereby gain agency to their steering. As such, the field is informed by the practices of material science, materials engineering and the emergent field of materials theory (1). At the same time, it transfers a particular set of representational paradigms and traditions for understanding the link between design and materialisation.

1 - Close up of the copper incrementally formed sheet

In architecture, computational design and advanced digital fabrication has led to a new sense of agency in the way we work with materials. The ability to program the steering of digital fabrication directly from our design tools has allowed architects a new scale of agency at the material scale (2). The detail of material address and the ability to variegate steering have broken the mass-fabrication logic of the standardised industrial series and enable a rethinking and profound innovation of material systems. However, this newfound agency and scale of material address is coarse in comparison to the fields of material science because of the need of architecture to engage at larger scales of deployment and performance. If material science and material theory examine materials typically at the micro- or nanoscale, then architectural design practice and fabrication still operate at the tolerance of the millimetre or the centimetre.

The insight in Complex Modelling is that different scales of address are connected, that they are concurrent as opposed to sequential, and that agencies across the scales affect each other in manifold ways. When we design material systems, the way materials are composed at microscale affects the ability to manipulate them at element scale, which again characterises their performance at structural scale. Conversely, the way elements at mesoscale are manipulated through fabrication affects their micro-scale composition, which redefines their structural performance.

Complex Modelling builds an overarching theoretical contribution that positions design agency at multiple concurrent scales across the design chain. By introducing three scales of engagement spanning the structure, the element and the material, Complex Modelling develops the underlying modelling infrastructures that allow such a design space to develop. In this design space, simulation becomes a central tool for characterising material behaviour at multiple scales and orchestrating their interaction. By mixing and merging different simulation methodologies across the scales of the material, the element and the structure, simulation changes from being a singular post-design method of design evaluation to becoming an integrated method of design incorporating knowledge of material behaviour across scales and enabling feedback along the design chain.

What arrives is the forming of an information-rich design paradigm that aims to reveal, connect and steer the complex behaviours of materials and structures. This new paradigm fundamentally disrupts the traditional understanding of architectural design space as siloed and singularly scaled, instead foregrounding the dynamisms of materials as affected by their environment, detailing and assembly. Here, the investigation and transfer of interdisciplinary modelling methods for adaptive parametrisation, integrated simulation, multi-scale modelling, machine learning and open topologies allow a new sense of agility in the design space, in turn allowing information to be passed between processes to inform fabrication routines, structural performance as well as overarching design intent. In these new modelling workflows, the architectural model is no longer singular or unified but instead composed of deep networks of multiple models with heterogeneous means of representation, from the geometric to the numeric, passing information between them in non-linear and atemporal manners. The model networks occur in time and through event, engaging explicit and discontinuous timesteps of calculation and feedback, thus driving design intent through incremental processes of form-finding rather than externalised shaping of absolute form (3).

2 - Digital sketch for EDF project / Designing with Living Technology

Complex Modelling situates feedback as a key concern for developing holistic and integrated design methods, asking how dynamic modes of information modelling can introduce new logics into the field of architectural representation. Complex Modelling hypothesises that developing new digital design methods for implementing feedback between different scales of engagement can lead to better, more creative and more sustainable building practices. Complex Modelling asks how new modelling practices can:

examine how the inter-relationship and feedback loops between different scales of design engagement, the structure, the element and the material, can allow for new insight into the use of materials in architectural practice.

investigate how new, information-rich modelling paradigms can allow new practical as well as conceptual tools for understanding the design process across the different processes of design creativity, analysis, specification and fabrication in the extended digital design chain.

query the role of geometry in these new representations and how we can retain the intuitive, creative and communicable dimensions of architectural design practice.

The end goal of Complex Modelling is allied to material optimisation but also to innovation. By understanding materials as engaged by complex behaviours and performances, and by creating the methods by which these behaviours can be controlled and utilised in design, a new dimension of design potential is unleashed, allowing us to innovate structural thinking. At stake are the antiquated paradigms of industrialisation and the fundamental economic drivers of standardisation and mass production, which lead to a materially intense built environment relegated with all that it entails of waste, dormant material and overproduction (4). The declared need for our era is a new material paradigm with which we can build more intelligently with less and engage more lightly with our environment. This has to do with developing paradigms for material design and fabrication that optimise material deployment and with creating light building systems, but also with inventing new structural systems that employ material behaviour in novel ways. The demonstrators of Complex Modelling, The Rise, Hybrid Tower, Stressed Skins, Bridge Too Far, Inflated Restraint and Isoropia devise new structural systems that radically reduce material deployment, creating hyper-light structures. However, they also challenge the way we work with materials in architecture, proposing new systems that engage interdependency between materials systems and introduce heterogeneity in otherwise standardised material practices. Complex Modelling asks what can be the material practices of the future through advanced computational design, how can we reconceptualise how architectural materials are fabricated and employed.

3 - ACADIA 2013 Rise workshop

Complex Modelling undertakes these investigations through an experimental research-by-design methodology focussing on design-led physical experimentation and full-scale prototyping. In Complex Modelling, these experiments retain a level of abstraction that allows them be future-oriented, while at the same time engaging and developing contemporary design and fabrication tools. In Complex Modelling, the physical experiments act as material research inquiries by which the concepts and technologies of the research inquiries are tested and evaluated. The method is relevant for architectural research as it ties design creativity to research investigation. Employing a research-by-design methodology allows the projects to engage directly with the investigated techniques and technologies across the digital chain from design and analysis to specification and fabrication. This integrated approach positions the research inquiries within a similar network of interconnected expertise and practice to that of architectural design practice. The material experiments generate shared empirical data that can be tested, analysed and evaluated by the research team (5).

In Complex Modelling, the demonstrator projects are paralleled by a series of probes and early prototypes, which are here called ‘speculations’. These projects expand the areas of concern and provide a design-led, materially engaged space for experimental probing. The role of these projects is to develop the research questions and to define the dimensions of an enquiry and its technologies. Complex Modelling is a highly interdisciplinary project. The project is realised through deep interactions between architectural design, structural engineering, computer science, material science and robotics. Complex Modelling also includes inter-sector collaborations with different industries. Collaborating and exchanging knowledge with high-end fabrication industries as well as with specialised architecture and engineering companies allow us to expand our knowledge and engage with otherwise proprietary processes of fabrication and design. On the one hand, these interactions reflect the forming of new interdisciplinary collaboration across the digital design chain in which the processes of design, analysis and fabrication are brought together. On the other hand, they reflect the breadth of concern that these kinds of innovations impact. The built environment is not only the concern of architects but of society, and as such, it engages broad efforts. By expanding our modelling boundaries — boundaries shaped by the proprietary conventions of disciplinary concern, methodology and perceptions of resolution — and by creating new design interfaces between low- and high-scale design agency, we come to perceive the interrelatedness of disciplines and their potential for creating new trans-disciplinary, trans-scalar, and trans-temporal practices (6).

Prof. Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen

image credits

Photography by CITA

Illustration by CITA

Photography by CITA 

REFERENCES

Askeland, D. R., Pradeep P. P. The Science & Engineering of Materials (5th ed.).