Architectural Association School of Architecture

Design Research LAB MArch

Staff: Yusuke Obuchi, Theodore Spyropoulos, Patrik Schumacher

The DRL has concluded the first year of a new three-year design research agenda: Proto-Design. Proto-Design investigates digital and analogue forms of computation in the pursuit of systemic design applications that are scenario- and time-based. Considering controls systems as open acts of design experimentation, the DRL examines production processes as active agents in the development of Proto-Design systems. The challenge is to find systems that can articulate urban deployment through poly-scalar correlations.

Parametric and generative modelling techniques are coupled with physical computing and analogue experiments to create dynamic feedback processes. New forms of spatial organisation are explored that are not type- or context-dependent. The aim is to detect scenarios that challenge the parameter-identification that directs systems to evolve as ecologies of machines or as material and computational regulating systems, instead moving towards an architecture that is both adaptive and hyper-specific.

This performance-driven approach seeks to develop novel design proposals concerned with the everyday. The iterative methodologies of the design studio focus on the investigation of spatial, structural and material organisations, engaging in contemporary discourses on computation and materialisation in the disciplines of architecture and urbanism.

The studio was organised as five parallel research projects exploring the possibilities of Proto-Design, led by Yusuke Obuchi, Theodore Spyropoulos, Patrik Schumacher, Alisa Andrasek and Marta Malé-Alemany. Yusuke Obuchi’s studio, Proto Tectonics, investigate material systems and multiscalar fractal logic for large-span structures. Theodore Spyropoulos’ studio, Digital Materialism, explore new forms of prototypical housing through evolutionary innovation and morphological novelty. Patrik Schumacher and Christos Passas’s studio, Interiority, develop complex, layered and highly differentiated tectonic systems that start to compete with the best historical examples in terms of richness, coherency and precise organisation. Alisa Andrasek’s studio, Wetware, pursue computation through the development of poly-scalar coastal infrastructures within high-pressure flooding zones. The Marta Malé-Alemany studio with Jeroen van Ameijde, Machinic Control, examine architectural design processes incorporating digital fabrication methods that challenge repetitive modes of industrial production.ic design for energetic models of new cities in emergent biomes).

Masters and Tutors Marta Malé-Alemany, Alisa Andrasek, Jeroen van Ameijde, Shajay Bhooshan, Christos Passas, Rob Stuart-Smith