Last week I attended the pre­sen­ta­tions of the asso­cia­tive design 2nd year at the Berlage research studio syn­thetic ver­nac­u­lar. Led by Peter Trum­mer and assisted by our fellow dys­turb evan­ge­list Martin Sobota, the class inves­ti­gated tra­di­tional chi­nese build­ing typolo­gies. The prin­ci­ples found in the analy­sis were used to create a set of rules to create a frame­work to para­met­ri­cally derive urban struc­ture and archi­tec­ture of an exem­plary plot in Shang­hai: Deus ex Machina.

The research group divided up into for teams, each focussing on dif­fer­ent base para­me­ters as FAR, degrees of pri­vacy, cli­mate, inter­nal room organ­i­sa­tion, sun tra­jec­to­ries. The formal deci­sions of the teams also led to vary­ing urban fab­rics, from low-​rise high-​density urban mass not unsim­i­lar to south-​american fave­las to a styled court­yard & slab net­work. The results are cut­ting edge and and visu­al­i­sa­tions of the process are breath-​takingly beau­ti­ful. But watch the movie first, then pro­ceed to the review.

The excel­lent cri­tique acknowl­edged that the intri­cacy of the para­met­ric mod­el­ing approach has vastly improved of the course of the last years at the Berlage classes. How­ever, the models are still linear in struc­ture, not span­ning dif­fer­ent scales or relat­ing to larger scale con­fig­u­ra­tions of the envi­ron­ment. From that per­spec­tive it was an inter­est­ing move to apply the method to an actual, real urban plot – the next task is to push things fur­ther, mix scales, create vari­ety. The para­me­ters now well emu­late known exist­ing real­i­ties and re-​create desired qual­i­ties. The chal­lenges lies in break­ing these lim­i­ta­tions, extend­ing the ranges of the para­me­ters to a point where the un-​expected can happen, and sur­pris­ing new qual­i­ties are gen­er­ated. The out­side influ­ences, land­scape, build­ing lim­i­ta­tions, real world effects, could also con­sti­tute the trou­bling ele­ment, which would intro­duce the ten­sion, the cat­a­stro­phies which the homo­ge­neous plans miss.

Lars Spuy­broek remarked that ‘when I stud­ied, my fellow stu­dents pre­sented quite sim­i­lar projects, it was at the end of dutch struc­tural­ism. But inter­est­ingly, they pre­sented it in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent way: the dis­course wasn’t about shift­ing and re-​configuring floor plans, but about grass root democ­racy, human inter­ac­tion, all the 60′s idealism.’ This is vis­i­ble when it comes to the eye-​level ren­der­ings of the dis­played projects: spaces of little pro­gram­matic def­i­n­i­tion, where the usual skaters and and happy cou­ples pho­to­shopped in look rather des­o­late. This is where a 2nd class could pick up the thread and eval­u­ate the gen­er­ated spaces, find the advan­tages and short­com­ings and tweak the para­me­ters accord­ingly, thus create a generate-test-feedback loop.

It is remark­able that even after look­ing at these points which need more inves­ti­ga­tion in this young methol­ogy, the results are con­vinc­ing – even more so because ‘the market would solve the prob­lem with four high rise towers’ as Zaera Polo noted.

Among the Crit­ics were:

• Theodore Spy­ropou­los (Theodore is the co-​director of the Archi­tec­tural
  Asso­ci­a­tion Design Research Lab in London)
• Ali Rahim (Ali is Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor in Penn­syl­va­nia, and is design direc­tor at C-A-P)
• Lars Spuy­broek (of NOX Architects)
• Lawrence Barth (Con­sul­tant Urban­ist for Zaha Hadid and Senior Lec­turer at the AA)
• Ale­jan­dro Zaera Polo (Ale­jan­dro is head of FOA and former Dean of the Berlage)
• Bing Bu (prin­ci­pal of One Desing Inc.)
• Felix Claus (co-​founder of Claus en Kaan)
• Ker­sten Geers (part­ner at Ker­sten Geers David van Severen)
• Jian­fei Zhu (teaches at the Uni­ver­sity of Melbourne)
• Thal Kamener (co-​director of 66east)
• Christo­pher Lee (unit master at the AA)
• Gabriele Mas­trigli (archi­tect and critic)
• Bert de Muynck (archi­tect, writer and researcher)

Par­tic­i­pants of the studio are: Nana Chen, Weijie Liu, Jiri Pavlicek, Shiyun Qian, Ming-​Ying Tsai, Luming Wang, Zhen­fei Wang and Sheng-​Ming Wu.

Down­load the movie here: associative-design.mp4 (156MB, right-​click to save)