Case Study: Sendai Mediatheque l Toyo İto, Matsuro Sasaki

Reading Text: Emergence- The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software l Steven Johnson

Emergence is a tour of what are called adaptive self-organising systems: systems that are made up of many interacting agents who are individually not terribly smart, but who collectively come up with intelligent higher-level behavior. An ant colony is a great example of this kind of system: nobody is technically “in charge”, and yet somehow the ants manage to behave in astonishingly complex and amazing ways: quickly determining the shortest distance to a nearby food source, shifting roles among the colony members in response to changing needs in the real world, ants wander randomly, and upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails. If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep traveling at random, but instead follow the trail laid by earlier ants, returning and reinforcing it if they eventually find food .Thus, when one ant finds a short path from the colony to a food source, other ants are more likely to follow that path, and such positive feedback eventually leaves all the ants following a single path.

The idea of the ant colony algorithm is to mimic this behavior with “simulated ants” walking around the search space representing the problem to be solved. The ant colony can be run continuously and can adapt to changes in real time. This is of interest in network routing and urban transportation systems. It turns out that the world is filled with these systems: in the formation of city neighborhoods, in the way our immune system learns about new invading microorganisms, in the neuronal connections of our brains. Johnson notes that this self re- organizing stems from the bottom up rather than directed by an external control factor

The 5 fundamental principals the author talks about are as follows

More is different – The drastic variation and complexity in terms of behavior and numbers is good for the higher outcome of work

Ignorance is useful -The ants demonstrate ignorance and carry out the task assigned rather than worry about complexity of the structure which could lead to further disaster

Encourage random encounters – The ants have an element of distributed computation to it involving the population of ants. They work without any orders and are able to adapt to transformation and change

Look for patterns – Exploit a global data structure that changes dynamically as each ant transverses the various route. They follow their ancestors, and the pheromones in them help them find their path and colonies they belong to.

Pay attention to your neighbors – An individual ant alters its behavior based on the behavior of other ants that it happens to encounter, involving probabilistic transitions and interaction among ants for better running of their colony and adapt to change for good when required.

The problem with the web is that it’s already far larger than the largest city on the planet, and it’s growing at an unprecedented clip, despite the recent economic downturn. When the great cities of the world experienced growth spurts, they dealt with the problem of growing too big too fast by developing neighborhoods – clusters of like-minded people gathering together and sharing their ideas within the larger metropolitan context. The web needs to undergo a similar transformation in order for it to deal with its growth rate. It needs to learn how to cluster.

Moriyama House-Tokyo Japan, Office Ryue Nishazawa
Reading -Cooking, Yo-ing, Thinking – Sanford Kwinter

The architect has tried Non-conventional housing typology: organized in clusters and has tried to break away from the traditional Japanese courtyard house thereby Creating more flexibility in terms of use and organized space.The elements can be inhabited by different and changing protagonists, they can be rented easily for different kinds of use thereby making it more adaptable and user friendly. various courtyards create changing situations (in environmental meanings but as well as social ones: by interaction of the inhabitants)In terms of privacy the windows are never facing each other, they either open to the landscape, a blank wall or the sky. So the privacy of each single cluster element is maintained. Although the architect is talking about privacy the windows are big. They appear like shopping windows or theatrical stages. The inhabitant is kind of exhibited to the people passing the ‘stage’,but the cluster is opened to the street, so in that case it is more open to public than the traditional courtyard housing typology. The spaces between the elements are ‘semi-public’, they are open to the street although it is clear, that it is a private site.

Sanford Kwinter ponders the complex encounters between technology, culture, and relational logics in architecture. The readings offer an extended meditation on infrastructure, computation, mechanical and material intelligence, and other multivariate facets of modernity. Far-reaching in scope, Far from Equilibrium amounts to a performance in writing of what Kwinter describes as radical anamnesis: the imagination’s escape from the sterile logic of what is. Compiling over a decade of architectural and critical writings.It is widely known that architectrural thought has begun to incorporate a variety of concerns about the natural world under the auspices to energy thereby accommodating the demand to rethink its relationship to the atmosphere

I would like to do a further research on the topic of environmental relation integrated building systems as they relate to architectural design and construction including study of principles of integrated design and the implications of these in relation to architectural design, and construction processes and outcomes.. Physical, visual and performative integration of building performance systems will be considered in terms of their relationship to design intent.