Research as Story Building: The Case of the Active Environment

The resent shift of attention in the architectural discourse towards issues of ecological design,coupled with the undeniable role of computation, has already cast a new operative role to the notion of Environment. Instead of being the passive, conceptualized or historicized context of an architectural object, the environment is quite literally becoming the object of design itself. By tracing the recent history of the notion of environment (from the 90ies onward) this paper will claim that we are moving away from the imposed-preconceived Cartesian object which negotiates through its boundaries its presence within its immediate context. Instead it will argue that the discipline is already considering an architecture in which the architectural object is only an instance of a designed environment. In many respects, this new understanding of environment aspires to be actively designed as a closed system of constant transformation, an autonomous milieu of exchange at all scales and all levels between substances, properties or qualities. This line of research will examine the current computational tools of design and will demonstrate in a systematic way how the environment – the active environment – can literally become, within a digital (CAD) platform the object of design.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4