Project Overview
Wild Stone
Cultured Stone
Dilemma
How cultured or wild will our geotechnical infrastructure become? Can material systems automation assist in new ways of translating ideas, diagrams, and simulations for multi-$billion resilient infrastructure projects into reality?
As water levels rise throughout the world, more people are vulnerable to devastation. Among those are some of the poorest in the world, living in marginalized areas, geographically prone to flooding and weather-related destruction. Time, money, and priority constraints are major obstacles. While modular construction, mass-customization and systems automation are transforming building efficiency and architecture from the inside out, our exterior resilience infrastructure is being aggregated one rock at a time.
Without intervention, an estimated 300 million people around the world would be overcome by flooding by 2050. (Scott A. Kulp & Benjamin H. Strauss) Stakeholders consist of millions of citizens along a million miles of coastlines and vulnerable areas, all needing protection. This is but one challenge in our built environment dealing with a constant debate between a ‘Cultured’ or ‘Wild’ aggregate systems.
Overview of Methods / Process
While this project has selected the seemingly benign materials palette of aggregate. Being a common and cost-effective material across a wide range of projects, aggregate in raw or less than entirely processed form poses challenges to the construction automation trend with other building and materials systems. Defining the elemental differences in material techniques across aggregate, modular, and componentized construction systems in diagrammatic form will ground the initial range of research. Through comparative exploration of evolving practices, primarily focused on coastal resilience planning for wealthy cities, I will identify key criteria of aggregate based design solutions, and differentiate these design criteria from, and as an extension of landscape and ecological urbanism trajectories, which have perpetuated certain ideals and materialized aesthetics over the last decades. This will be accomplished by identifying ranges of precision in materiality, various levels of detail or at what moments designers were willing or able to relinquished control, at what moment will this represent a shift towards a geotechnical complexity, and potential for an autonomous or responsive urban future to come forth.
To arrive at this future, requires a new toolset and a potential new system of management. Through critique of existing ‘City Engines’ and computational tool sets I will identify criteria required of a platform for dealing with ‘wild’ material systems at various levels of detail (LOD. Identifying gaps in design and construction software engines will include commented examples of existing engines, I will examine those prone to dimensionally vague (conceptual and diagrammatic) representations and those prone to dimensionally specific (models and constructed simulations). In defining various levels of detail in across complex sites and materiality, information and feedback management becomes a critical ledger to be tracked and distribution or ownership of responsibility is as critical a technological hurdle as that of the physical construction computation. Platforms in blockchain technology used for crypto currencies, and freeform software development sites such as Glitch or GitHub will serve as case studies in comparison to the AECO industry.
Overview
The original idea for this thesis came in a mission to attach the speculative design and construction practices of a bespoke landscapes to the broader built environment in a tangible way. I will be studying the opportunities and applications of aggregate, (bulk or wild) materials systems within the broader built environment.
From a commonly discussed knowledge gap in the software for design and construction of ‘wild’ materials and designed landscapes, these systems tend to be more unpredictable, and generally difficult to document and control. Thus, related professionals often relegate these less predictable components of the built environment to the most manual or analog of approaches while the ‘cultured’ components of our cities continue to be emphasized in a real estate market of innovation. In other words, our ability to work with large rock, mud, soils, (aggregate) and other common materials at the geotechnical foundations of our built environment remains in the early diesel age of construction, while ‘cultured’ material aesthetics proliferate.
“Cultured” : grown or made under controlled conditions _ Merriam-Webster
This thesis builds on skills and lessons learned from actual projects undertaken on behalf of affluent estates in Aspen Colorado, a context of sensitive ecological landscapes, with large-scale construction of artificial streams, wetlands, and other seemingly wild landscapes, where individual boulders amongst thousands to be placed could take days to set. The budgets, levels of accuracy for perfection, and time scales of these projects inspired technological innovations in 3D scanning, documenting, and scoring a virtual model of these complex wild material constructs. In the context of broader urban design, I would like to know if we could leverage similar technologies and a few new tools to achieve mass design intent without individual aggregate attention rather than obsessing over each stone one at a time to achieve rich and seemingly ‘wild’ places.
As a code-using designer, and adapting the level of care and precision of typical high dollar landscapes ($250/SF+), I will argue for and outline several new software functionalities that do not yet perform broadly in current built environment engines. By building the preliminary specifications of new software tools in the aggregation of ‘wild’ IE (rock, water and organic matter) rather than ‘cultured’ (cast-in-place concrete, steel beams, and pre-fabricated urbanism), we may not only achieve new opportunities in the ecological landscape definition of the terms, but also provide tooling for new forms of urban aggregate across more dynamic, and less predictable cultural conditions.
Perhaps a cultural shift in documenting or scoring the built environment will enable new applications of settlement, habitat, foundations, infrastructure, and resilience. Contemporary practices around the globe are working on similar challenges in material contexts of geotechnical infrastructure for coastal resilience. Visions and analysis of the intent for these “geotechnical urbanisms” abound in the work of SCAPE, Bradley Cantrell, Christophe Girot, and Sherwood Engineers to name just a few. However, the act of assembly, the scoring of how one gets from today to a geotechnical ensemble lies primarily for our industry in PDF abstractions, two dimensional static windows into what could be a dynamic geotechnical reality.
Through several visual examples, I will demonstrate the design tendency to try and force these material systems into predictability. While an emerging trend to work in ‘wild’ aggregate contexts, as illustrated in particular by practices like SCAPE, it seems the growing need to work with these materials, is still a tremendously demanding and intensive design exercise. This thesis aspires to fill a few gaps in the tool sets for dealing with aggregate and potentially other less predictable or ‘wild’ material contexts, so that a next generation of AECO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Ownership) professionals can leverage these ideas to help drive an emerging future of Geotechnical Urbanism practices.
Applications in the Built Environment
A multitude of different operations and constraints in assembling the physical components of a city exist. Some of these practices exist for a predictable or static culture and others are less developed (in software) for the dynamic or ‘wild’ contexts of our built landscape environment.
There are projects, at the edges of our existing cities, which tend to be more dynamic and allow for larger tolerances in realization of the built environment. While exploring the concepts in context of an existing city, I postulate that perhaps a more dynamic urban settlement with more gracious tolerances might be visualized using these concepts of working with aggregate. Might this be an emerging geotechnical urbanism?
This is not an entirely new notion, in 2019 Bradley Cantrell framed the context of tolerance in that of humility. “In many ways, computational landscape architecture requires us to evolve intellectually. If we can take a more humble approach to the planet, we’ll find ways to not only surpass our current limits of construction and evolution, but bring a rich and evolving ecosystem with us.”
If we can begin to compute these complex materials of (rock / mud / organic matter) can we then compute other complex physical systems of urbanization? Presently we draw facsimiles, symbols to represent complex elements in our projects, and add a note for the contractor to review in field with the Landscape Architect. Can the field of view come into the design office? Can the design office extend to the field? Can the role of design and that of the contractor begin to translate to projects in new ways?
Cultural Settlement as Aggregate
Dealing with rock as aggregate may be a relatively simple in concept. However, a rock’s geometric complexity, particularly when dealing with many of these similar but geometrically unique aggregates in mass presents great challenges. Similarly, our world’s perceived informal slums, favelas, or settlements are built up of many relatively simple and similar structures, but each individually unique geometrically in a complex aggregation. There are certainly many differences in the cultural, economic, and human characteristics of the actors within each of these systems but in the understandings of the complex geometries, they are similar. Could perhaps similar software tools and geotechnical modes of inquiry be useful in both contexts of the built environment?
I do not deny the cultural, sociological, and economic complexity of human settlement. There are critical needs for continued architectural solutions, modular housing approaches, and new technologies for efficient and comfortable enclosed habitats. However, I return to a question of how we design and construct the rest of our built environment outside of building walls in an increasingly technological world, potential new worlds on hybridized terrestrial and aquatic landscapes, or in extra-terrestrial contexts of the moon, mars, and other environments being pursued for development. Will our projected Terran futures continue to be hard-edged cultural solutions or embedded within the ‘wild’ contexts they continue to subsume?
“Terran” : (in science fiction) relating to the planet Earth or its inhabitants. – Oxford English Dictionary Online.
The following initial visual comparisons begin to illustrate a material similarity of geometric patterning, complexity in works of bespoke landscape architecture and informal settlement. Definitions of gradient, flow, granular scale in response to geotechnical edges of the landscape are among just a few of the experimental lines of inquiry the first half of this thesis explores. I will distil these criteria into usable drawing and simulation tool sets for the aggregation of our geotechnical futures.
Working with Wild Aggregate – From Sorting to Searching to “Scoring”
A geotechnical interpretation of the architectural lecture by Mario Carpo, The Second Digital Turn. - “Computers search … humans sort”
How do we work with virtual aggregate?
Given the tools (software) we have today in AEC…
There are algorithms for grids / stacks, random nodes / scattering, for streamlined ‘fish’ or curvaceous form giving. But why not a drift, something in-between all of this. An incredibly common / complex formation that combines freedom with intent, material rhythms and precisions with broad based approximations or gesture.
Designing wild / complex and custom environments to a specific intent is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. For better or worse, whether undertaken in analogue or virtual space, the challenge of dealing with non-unitized and highly site-specific contexts simply have not allowed for a procedural or modular approach.
There are current gaming or visualizations approaches which seem to perform admirably in simulating prototypical samplings of various environments but fail in the ability to achieve varying or sufficient specific design intent for the AEC / built environment realm.
I hypothesize here, that great advancement (or at least exploration) in potential design solutions can be made in a design realm beyond the current analogue processes, once software is able to handle those typologies of geometry.
