PAST EDUCATION
FORMATIONS & EMBODIMENTS
Robotic Building graduation studio involves a research driven design approach, which primarily focuses on articulating the complex relationship between social, environmental, spatial, technological and user-based information with physical matter. Focusing on the development of large architectural scale urban inserts, the MSc 3 studio investigates the aforementioned information sets in an associative / parametric manner with the help of computational and analogue apparatus. The MSc 3 studio creates thus a solid foundation in computational design, engineering and above all paves a critical thinking process not only necessary for pursuing the MSc 4 graduation design project at Hyperbody but also to become a design professional in the contemporary information driven era.
In MSc 4 students select one parametric formation form series developed in MSc 3 in order to implement it into architecture. This process requires in addition to bottom-up approaches top-down methodologies for specific implementations of formations into architectural embodiments. Bottom-up and top-down methodologies will be discussed in the MSc 3-4 studio with respect to their deterministic and non-deterministic, as well as procedural and object-oriented intrinsic nature and their impact on design. In this context, bottom-up methodologies refer to process-oriented approaches implying deterministic use of environmental, functional, and structural data for architectural design, while top-down methodologies refer to non-deterministic choices regarding use of formal language, for instance, that are object-oriented and imply a positioning and framing of the architectural work within the contemporary architectural discourse.
DESIGN-TO-ROBOTIC-PRODUCTION
In connection to the Game Set Match (GSM) 3 symposium, there were three themes investigated. Next Generation Building, Robotic Building, and SMARTEnvironments. Descriptions of the themes are available on the GSM 3 website. The challenge was to develop an innovative concept for integrated interactive climate control and energy generation performed by distributed, wirelessly networked climatic small- and micro-scale components, robotically / locally produced, locally driven by users’ preferences and external climatic conditions. Furthermore, the design took into consideration:
(a) Customizability of space and indoor climate use by taking into account short-, mid-, and long-term changes in the use of space and respective individual needs based (not on average but) real-time ambient and spatial data; this can be implemented by embedding interactive architectural building components and employing robotic production.
(b) Integration of material, building and architectural systems by employing numerically controlled and robotic design-to-production (D2P) processes.