Performance Oriented Architecture

Architecture is on the brink. It is a discipline in crisis. Over the last two decades, architectural debate has diversified to the point of fragmentation and exhaustion. What is called for is an overarching argument or set of criteria on which to approach the design and construction of the built environment. Here, the internationally renowned architect and educator Michael Hensel advocates an entirely different way of thinking about architecture. By favouring a new focus on performance, he rejects longstanding conventions in design and the built environment. This not only bridges the gap between academia and practice, but, even more significantly, the treatment of form and function in design. It also has a far-reaching impact on knowledge production and development, placing an important emphasis on design research in architecture and the value of an interdisciplinary approach. Though ‘performance’ first evolved as a concept in the humanities in the 1940s and 1950s, it has never previously been systematically applied in architecture in an inclusive manner. Here Michael Hensel offers Performance-Orientated Architecture as an integrative approach to architectural design, the built environment and questions of sustainability. He highlights how core concepts and specific traits, such as climate, material performance and settlement patterns, can put architecture in the service of the natural environment. A wide range of examples are cited to support his argument, from traditional sustainable buildings, such as the Kahju Bridge in Isfahan and the Topkapí Palace in Istanbul to more contemporary works by Cloud 9, Foreign Office Architects, Steven Holl and OCEAN.

Software services are established as a programming concept, but their impact on the overall architecture of enterprise IT and business operations is not well-understood. This has led to problems in deploying SOA, and some disillusionment. The SOA Source Book adds to this a collection of reference material for SOA. It is an invaluable resource for enterprise architects working with SOA.The SOA Source Book will help enterprise architects to use SOA effectively. It explains: What SOA is How to evaluate SOA features in business terms How to model SOA How to use The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF™) for SOA SOA governance This book explains how TOGAF can help to make an Enterprise Architecture. Enterprise Architecture is an approach that can help management to understand this growing complexity.

This book argues that the Federal Government needs a new approach to IT management. Introducing a novel five-step process called performance-driven management (PDM), author Ira Sachs explains in detail how to reduce risk on large IT programs and projects. This is an essential tool for all IT and business managers in government and contractors doing business with the government, and it has much useful and actionable information for anyone who is interested in helping their business save money and take on effective, successful practices.

The Routledge Companion to Paradigms of Performativity in Design and Architecture focuses on a non-linear, multilateral, ethical way of design thinking, positioning the design process as a journey. It expands on the multiple facets and paradigms of performative design thinking as an emerging trend in design methodology. This edited collection explores the meaning of performativity by examining its relevance in conjunction with three fundamental principles: firmness, commodity and delight. The scope and broader meaning of performativity, performative architecture and performance-based building design are discussed in terms of how they influence today’s design thinking. With contributions from 44 expert practitioners, educators and researchers, this volume engages theory, history, technology and the human aspects of performative design thinking and its implications for the future of design.

Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments—unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency. Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more-than-human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters. Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.

For the past 50 years, the advancements of technology have equipped architects with unique tools that have enabled the development of new computer-mediated design methods, fabrication techniques, and architectural expressions. Simultaneously, in contemporary architecture new frameworks emerged that have radically redefined the traditional conceptions of design, of the built environment, and of the role of architects. Cybernetic Architectures argues that such frameworks have been constructed in direct reference to cybernetic thinking, a thought model that emerged concurrently with the origins of informatics and that embodies the main assumptions, values, and ideals underlying the development of computer science. The book explains how the evolution of the computational perspective in architecture has been parallel to the construction of design issues in reference to the central ideas fostered by the cybernetic model. It unpacks and explains this crucial relationship, in the work of digital architects, between the use of information technology in design and the conception of architectural problems around an informational ontology. This book will appeal to architecture students and scholars interested in understanding the recent transformations in the architectural landscape related to the advent of computer-based design paradigms.

There are many applications that require parallel and distributed processing to allow complicated engineering, business and research problems to be solved in a reasonable time. Parallel and distributed processing is able to improve company profit, lower costs of design, production, and deployment of new technologies, and create better business environments. The major lesson learned by car and aircraft engineers, drug manufacturers, genome researchers and other specialist is that a computer system is a very powerful tool that is able to help them solving even more complicated problems. That has led computing specialists to new computer system architecture and exploiting parallel computers, clusters of clusters, and distributed systems in the form of grids. There are also institutions that do not have so complicated problems but would like to improve profit, lower costs of design and production by using parallel and distributed processing on clusters. In general to achieve these goals, parallel and distributed processing must become the computing mainstream. This implies a need for new architectures of parallel and distributed systems, new system management facilities, and new application algorithms. This also implies a need for better understanding of grids and clusters, and in particular their operating systems, scheduling algorithms, load balancing, heterogeneity, transparency, application deployment, which is of the most critical importance for their development and taking them by industry and business.