Liquid Architecture

Liquid Architecture challenges the idea of architecture as a fixed, inert container and reconceptualises it as a body whose boundaries are rather blurred and ever-changing. This book moves away from form as the primary driver of spatial protocols and explores what the built environment might look like when viewed through the lenses of a ‘wet ontology’ that is attentive to fluidity, flows and territorial dynamism. A reconfiguration of architectural materials and authorship is thus considered, leading, in turn, to an exploration of the ethical dimensions of co-designing with natural systems (of various viscosities) through liquid paradigms. The book examines a set of principles for practice-led discoveries that incorporate hybrid, mixed media with the author’s intersubjective relationship with liquid matter. Drawing from qualitative-based analytical investigation models, the text allows comprehension of the liquid phenomena via material contextualisation of an ever-becoming research setting. Through a practical and theoretical engagement with the ontology of liquids, the reader is exposed to a range of design-led experiments and creative propositions, visualisation systems, construction, and testing of physical models that collectively translate into a series of novel insights for architectural agendas. This book will be of interest to architecture and design research students and academics because it advocates the need for a more symbiotic and resilient approach to natural systems, which could benefit from the integration of regenerating material flows into our buildings and urban settlements.

This book on flexible formwork for fluid architecture is a multi-faceted research that covers a broad field: from design to material and technology, and from history to future developments. It offers a pragmatic approach that can be extended with more cases, materials, techniques and methods for fluid architecture, and provides a better understanding of the main aspects of fluid architecture and to help them find the most suitable combinations of all aspects. The book is a challenging experience with many new discoveries, including two patents: one on moulding of fluid surfaces and one on 3D printing of fibre–reinforced ice. It also features two world records: the larges span (30 meters) and the highest thin shell structure (30,5 meters) in ice as well as a method for the construction of a fully laminated shell structure in insulated glass.

Architecture is based upon the misconception that strong is stable, both in sense of energy and structure, as an unchanged state of microclimate would require more material or insulation. Trans-structures are the opposite: building elements with the response-ability to change according to external conditions in order to maintain stability in terms of structure and/or energy. In this type of building, any effect (structural or thermal load) would generate an immediate affect (a response of the structure). Energy and weight would be counteracted and on a total scale, change would not occur. Such buildings are always in transition from one state to another, unlike conventional structures.

The Theory of Architecture Concepts, Themes & Practices Paul-Alan Johnson Although it has long been thought that theory directs architectural practice, no one has explained precisely how the connection between theory and practice is supposed to work. This guide asserts that architectural theory does not direct practice, but is itself a form of reflective practice. Paul-Alan Johnson cuts through the jargon and mystery of architectural theory to clarify how it relates to actual applications in the field. He also reveals the connections between new and old ideas to enhance the reader's powers of critical evaluation. Nearly 100 major concepts, themes, and practices of architecture--as well as the rhetoric of architects and designers--are presented in an easily accessible format. Throughout, Johnson attempts to reduce each architectural notion into its essential concept. By doing so, he makes theory accessible for everyday professional discussion. Topics are arranged under ten headings: identification, definition, power, attitudes, ethics, order, authority, governance, relationship, and expression. Areas covered under these headings include: * Utopic thought in theories of architecture * Advocacy and citizen participation in architecture * The basis of architectural quality and excellence * The roles of the architect as artist, poet, scientist, and technologist * Ethical obligations of architecture * Rationales for models and methods of design * How authority is determined in architecture * How architects structure their concepts * Conventions of communication within the architectural profession Each section begins by showing the etymology of key terms of the topic discussed, along with a summary history of the topic's use in architecture. Discussions probe the conceptual and philosophical difficulties of different theories, as well as their potential and limitations in past and present usage. Among the provocative issues discussed in terms of their relationship to architecture are chaos theory, feminism, service to the community, and the use of metaphor. Johnson points out with stunning clarity the intentions as well as the contradictions and inconsistencies of all notions and concepts. All architects and designers, as well as students and teachers in these disciplines, will gain many insights about architectural thought in this groundbreaking text.

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive." Liquid life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, it conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system. Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration: Rolf Hughes' "angelology" of language explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina's graphical notations help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, Liquid Life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away. Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at Newcastle University (UK), and has also been a Rising Waters II Fellow for the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016), TWOTY futurist in 2015, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society, and a Senior TED Fellow in 2010. She is also the coordinator of the Living Architecture project, an EU-funded project that establishes the principles for our buildings to share some of the properties of living things, e.g. metabolism, operating at the intersection of architecture, building construction, bio-energy and synthetic biology. She is also the author of Vibrant Architecture (De Gruyter, 2015), Star Ark: A Living, Self-Sustaining Spaceship (Springer, 2017), and Soft Living Architecture: An Alternative View of Bio-informed Design Practice (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Publicatie n.a.v. de conferentie gehouden op 1 april 2006 op de faculteit Bouwkunde van de TU Delft over de huidige en toekomstige veranderingen rond de digitaal ontworpen architectuur- en designpraktijk.

Japan’s postwar urban imagination through the Metabolism architecture movement and visionary science fiction authors The devastation of the Second World War gave rise to imaginations both utopian and apocalyptic. In Japan, a fascinating confluence of architects and science fiction writers took advantage of this space to begin remaking urban design. In The Metabolist Imagination, William O. Gardner explores the unique Metabolism movement, which allied with science fiction authors to foresee the global cities that would emerge in the postwar era. This first comparative study of postwar Japanese architecture and science fiction builds on the resurgence of interest in Metabolist architecture while establishing new directions for exploration. Gardner focuses on how these innovators created unique versions of shared concepts—including futurity, megastructures, capsules, and cybercities—making lasting contributions that resonate with contemporary conversations around cyberpunk, climate change, anime, and more. The Metabolist Imagination features original documentation of collaborations between giants of postwar Japanese art and architecture, such as the landmark 1970 Osaka Expo. It also provides the most sustained English-language discussion to date of the work of Komatsu Sakyō, considered one of the “big three” authors of postwar Japanese science fiction. These studies are underscored by Gardner’s insightful approach—treating architecture as a form of speculative fiction while positioning science fiction as an intervention into urban design—making it a necessary read for today’s visionaries.

"This book presents a broad view of Busoni's compositional activities as not only connected to musical traditions of the past, especially the music of J.S. Bach and W.A. Mozart, but also as closely aligned with contemporary interest in experimentalism. Developments during the twentieth century included new means of pitch organization, the spatialization of sound, and the expansion of formal structures. Busoni helped pioneer these trends by writing pieces in which sound radiates from different directions, by creating montage formal structures, and by freely using all twelve pitches of the chromatic scale without avoiding consonances. In the process, the book brings Busoni's music into discourse with recent multivalent accounts of modernism in music that move beyond notions of rupture with the past as well as beyond elitist esotericism. In addition, it reveals that many of Busoni's innovations were rooted in interdisciplinary thinking that reconciled the spatial and the temporal in unique manners. While his abstract metaphysical notions of music transcended physical boundaries, the realization of his ideas was informed by an understanding of tangible architectural spaces and styles fostered by the study of buildings and floor plans. In addition, he engaged in a rich exchange of ideas with contemporary architects and artists, such as Henry Van de Velde and members of the Weimar Bauhaus. The book concludes by documenting ways Busoni's spatialized architectural music left a lasting imprint on future generations of composers, artists, and early film pioneers, such as Hans Richter, Heinrich Neugeboren, Wladimir Vogel, Stefan Wolpe, and Edgard Varèse"--