Morphs: Moving Architecture with Decentralized Brain

Architect William Bondin calls his structures Morphs, an acronym for 'Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra.' These are intended to move slowly through public spaces such as parks and engage and interact with the people present there. The core innovation here is that the structure is built out of tetrahedras which consist of trusses that can extend to up to twice their length. This property allows a tetrahedra to shift its center of gravity so that at some point it can flip over in any of the three directions. This allows the structure to navigate through a space.

To do this navigation, the system relies on some simple principles that are in accordance with embodied cognition. It has sensors distributed throughout the system that measure properties such as the presence of water, temperature, and light, and based on simple rules it learns to behave so that it will avoid water, roads and shaded areas, and go towards areas more crowded with people and with more sunlight. It also learns about its environment in order to determine where it has already been and where it should go. This behavior is inspired by slime molds, which offload their memory to the environment by depositing slime so that they know where they have already been.

The environment is a crucial factor in designing embodied agents, as Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard describe in the book "How the Body Shapes the Way we Think". And it is often overlooked by designers of intelligent agents, who may tend to think from a cognitivist perspective and focus on the brain as the main controller of behavior. We need to think of behavior as a dynamically evolving interplay between the agent's brain/neural system, body and the environment. Together, these factors make the system reach certain 'attractor states' of behavior that fit the embodiment in an optimal way so that it will behave most efficiently. The book mentions some interesting ideas about how to have the environment contribute to the emergence of intelligent behavior:

- 'Scaffolding': Structuring the environment with passive objects to simplify tasks. With adequate scaffolding, mechanisms for successful navigation will be very cheap.

- Offloading memory to the environment - information about the past can be contained in the current situation this way and included directly into sensory-motor loops rather than requiring cognitive action.

- Getting the material properties (elasticity, stiffness, damping etc.) of the body exactly right to fit the environment is crucial. If we get the material properties right, the desired behaviors ('trajectories towards attractor states') will emerge from the interaction with the environment. I can't stress enough that every detail is crucial here - imagine for example if your achilles was only a little bit less elastic or a little longer; it would completely change the way your entire body moves!

- Placement of sensors is also crucial - it is best to have sensors there where the most structured data can be derived from the environment.

Based on these kinds of principles for embodied intelligence, as the Morphs are a nice example of, I would like to see much more innovation!

The metropolis goes wild

Lena Steinkühler is a German filmmaker who has a quite radical future vision for the metropolitan city. In a short movie clip created for her graduation project she portrays how technological structures in New York City start coming alive, react to the local needs of the people, or just freely dance and move around.



Of course this is purely speculative design fiction, almost bordering on a kind of fetishism for the new wave of interconnected and adaptive technologies is starting to come up. Besides the visual power of the movie - the animated movements are wonderful, as are the music, pacing and transitions from NYC how it is to NYC how it could be- , what we should take along is the big idea that adaptivity and intelligent behavior in general can fulfill multiple needs depending on local circumstances, which can even be a strategy to tackle issues such as overpopulation in metropolitan areas.

Scripted spatial complexity

Complexity is the new minimalism, and more is the new less. Many mature minds today have gotten reasonably used to the complexity and interconnectedness of the world, and we no longer need our technological creations to exude simplicity and purity so that we can let our mind have some breathing space. We are more and more skilled at having our senses flooded while mentally staying at a comfortable level. Now we are ready to bring an intelligent complexity into the physical environment we live in.

More and more, products, graphics, and architecture is created that is fueled by the urge for created complexity. Often, these things borrow heavily from nature, which shows through in the outer form. Those things can impress us because they are new, and they look natural while being man-made. But once you're over that shock it tends to seem very natural that we would build things that way. The machine age we created after the second industrial revolution allowed humanity to quickly set up healthy, thriving, functional societies, but they tore us away from nature. In the sixties and seventies we massively returned to nature, and now we are integrating the world of nature and the world of the machine. We are now getting used to that new way of building, and we need lots of exploration.

One of the pioneers in this area who are making this into a career is Marc Fornes, and it is his work that triggered me to write a bit about complexity. He uses scripts to generate architectural forms, and has been displaying these constructions in the form of small spaces that people can walk through. It is interesting that Marc Fornes is creating his own design language through his work, and is not simply mimicking nature or strictly using natural principles. Instead, he seems to be mixing natural elements and human preferences, for example in his material use and form language.

Now it's time for designers to follow people like Marc Fornes, and bring in complexity in forms where we can, and even more so when we can intelligently merge form with function this way. But also visual complexity alone can greatly elevate people's experiences of products in that it takes them out of their minds, and into the world again.

The beauty of complexity

Kas Oosterhuis takes architecture to the next level as it becomes complex, parametric, organic, emotive, and alive. I remember reading his book 'Architecture goes Wild' back in the 2000's, and it started triggering a quantum leap in my own thinking and creativity. His recent talk on TEDx Delft is basically a recap of that book, while he shows some new projects as manifestations of his view on design and development. Watch it here:

A chapel for the 21st century

In the modern societies we live in today, dogmatic and hierarchical forms of religion do not have much of a hold on us anymore. We no longer accept that there is a divine realm or entity standing above us, and we think that we can manage this entire deal we call life on our own. But after having explored being a fragmented and striving individual, without any connection to higher realms, we usually become so caught up in the tornado of life that we begin to question the meaning of it at some point. We become a little tired of the playing around in the physical world of form, that we start looking for more.

Architect Luis Pons must have thought something along those lines before he created a beautiful cocoon-like structure where people may become more still and find, so to say, the center of the tornado they are whirling around in. In his words: "In the chapel we leave the distractions and chatter of the everyday world behind. Here we are able to embrace and enhance our ability to reconnect to the energy source that is within ourselves and always available in the universe."



Turning inward as an individual, becoming esoteric instead of exoteric, is what we are replacing religion with. We no longer seek meaning in a higher, metaphysical realm, nor do we simply play around and have fun all the time as an individual on this earth. Beyond that, we seek ultimate meaning in the world we live in by finding the center, the home, of our own energy. We discover that beyond a physical being, we are an energetic being. As an individual, we juggle around in the realm of form. As a soul, we expand and play around in the realm of energy.

Because the function of religion has become purified from dogma and socio-physically decentralized, we can now incorporate it much more intimately into our personal lives, without any need for a big church. A space like Luis Pons' little chapel will do fine. The chapel is constructed within an aluminum frame that suspends 69 elliptical panels of translucent fabric. The serene and immersiveness of the space is enhanced by dynamic LED lighting, sounds, and scents. It is also possible to join in shared meditative sessions through an internet connection. Go see the work in Miami, where it is part of the exhibition called 'Soul does Matter'.

Solar leafs to charge electric vehicles

In an assignment for Nissan, architecture firm su11 has envisioned a modular, future-oriented system for charging electric vehicles. The system consists of several 'E-VINE stations' that have a central unit to charge and reprogram the electric vehicle, with leafs above it to capture solar energy. These leafs are envisioned to be separate modules that can link up, so that the amount of leafs at a station can be adjusted according to the local energy needs. This is important, according to su11, because the transition from gasoline-based fuel to the fully electric vehicle is likely to proceed gradually. The system, like a vine then, can grow over time towards a fully electric and 'green' future.

Biological architecture

Here's a little collection of conceptual architecture that shows a shift towards holistic design thinking on both the macro- and the microscale. This kind of work definitely brings a new aesthetic into the world while opening up our minds to the idea that what we are creating as humans might not be that far off in quality from what the natural world has been creating all those millions of years, even that maybe our work lies in line with that process itself. And whereas surely this approach to design is not what will 'save humanity' as it might account mostly for our physical needs, but not for our complete scope of psychical needs, it surely is a wonderful step in the ascent of humankind.



Vincent Callebaut has created a far-future concept for airships fueled by a specific type of seaweed. These organisms would produce not oxygen but dihydrogen through photosynthesis, hence the name of the concept 'Hydrogenase'. Vincent envisions these 400-meter tall ships to not only function as passenger transportation, but also as floating buildings such as hospitals. They would be able to move at 175km/h by means of twenty wind propellors. The ships would furthermore be provided with an intelligent skin that incorporates nano-technologies to make it self-cleaning and self-repairing.



Yheu-Shen Chua has re-envisioned the Hoover dam to be a highly organic and open structure that actually makes transparent the waterflow and the ecology within the water. It would incorporate a bridge, a gallery, and a vertical aquarium.




If it's up to the French guys who created the 'Flat Tower' concept, a global-minded humanity makes no big deal of who owns what piece of land. Instead of building vertically to create more living spaces in the dense urban environment, they take a different approach: open and organic horizontal structures that dome the underlying cityscape. This might be very interesting for hot parts of the world, where such a structure could convert a large amount of sunlight into energy, and provide the city with more shadow area.



The concept skyscraper 'Hydra' is envisioned to provide energy to its inhabitants by means of a lightweight grapheme exoskeleton. This structure would attract lightning bolts which could then charge several mega-batteries.




Finally, here's a concept from the nineties by Eugene Tsui for a sustainable city built in the sea. Of special interest is the structure of the building, which is modeled after the human spine in order to direct and disperse stresses and strains. It would also have a "Living Machine" module that employs marine organisms to transform sea water into drinking water.

By the way, there's an excellent Zaha exhibition in Paris until October 30th. You can find it in a special pavilion just outside the Institut du Monde Arabe. It shows some of Zaha's projects, some experimental work, her working process and underlying design philosophy. I've visited myself and overall, it gives you a good feel of what organic and bio-inspired architecture can become.

Kinetic building skin

The Kinetower by Kinetura is probably one of the best present-day examples of the potential of moving architecture. It has a dynamic building facade that is composed of a pattern of movable elements. These can respond to the needs of the moment by curling up and down, thus either closing or opening the building up.



It seems that the idea of a dynamic skin is one of the first aspects of technology that has it move towards a truly interconnected, physically intelligent, almost biological state. We are seeing the living skin more in architecture, such as in the Geotube by Faulders Studio, and it is also trickling down into automotive design, with the BMW Gina and subtly with the Renault Dezir, as well as into product design such as in the works of Karim Rashid and Ross Lovegrove. I think we can only celebrate this, immerse ourselves into the aesthetics of it, as well as incorporate it into our own creative processes where possible.

Sustainable floating cities

Most of the Western cities have just emerged bit by bit, which can cause quite the inefficiencies in a changed, high-paced and interconnected world. Other cities have been based on a grid-like system which works as a system for living but completely takes the 'soul' out of a city. Then there are a few cities that have been based on a different kind of plan, as a more artistic approach, such as the city of Brasilia as designed by Oscar Niemeyer. This has turned out to be quite a failure as it was not anticipated how the people would actually live there.

Vincent Callebaut has another idea, which is also based on a preconceived plan mostly, yet it's a piece of intelligent, somewhat holistic and environmentally responsible thinking. And the structure he proposes is extremely beautiful too. His concept is to create floating cities along the coastline that somewhat look like Lilypads. Each of the cities can provide residence to 50.000 people, which could be people that have lost their home in a traditional city through a natural disaster. Beside aesthetics the unique aspect of these cities is that they have zero emissions, and even process carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This, the Belgian architect envisions, can be reached through using energy from the sun, the wind, from biomass, and from the tidal waves.

I like the thinking and the design, and I think this can work if we can get the money together. Dubai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, anyone?

Houses made of meat

Brooklyn-based architect Mitchell Joachim has a few good ideas about future housing. One is about growing houses from plants by using scaffolding. The other is a bit more radical. Joachim intends to build houses from deposited cell matter, using different cell types for different functions. In other words, he literally wants to create houses as if they were living organisms made of meat, skin, fat, and muscles.

a transformable apartment

A nice example of how more restrictions enrich design is the transformable apartment by architect Gary Chang. Elements such as walls and bookshelves can slide along rails, so a storage room can transform into a bedroom or bathroom with not much more than the flick of a wrist. In this, Chang has essentially collapsed spaces the way Picasso collapsed perspectives, and made the function of the tiny spaces in his apartment adaptable to the situation.

vertical lawns

Grass goes vertical thanks to Green Living Technologies. They developed a system that allows grass, but also other plants like vegetables, to grow on a wall. A first commercial application of this very green idea is to control the placement of grass of different colors and thus create advertising space on a vertical lawn. Another side effect is that we create an entirely new habitat, and I wonder which animals will start to settle there. I'd love to see vertical snails, bunnies, and lawnmowers.

swarming robots pooping out architectural structures

Architecture student Mark Bearak has proposed machines that can swarm together and perpetuate themselves upwards by excreting structural material for building woven architectures.

botany building, a new branch of architecture

Developments like this just brighten up my days, as we are getting closer to my dream of an organic world where everything is growing and dynamically interconnected with everything else. If we release ourselves of the mostly implicitly ingrained technoprogressive bias in our minds we come to see that we should not continue drawing away from nature and create a clean, abstract and cold lifeworld (look around you!) that feels safe and comfortable for our own little selves, we can come to see that technology and nature can merge, in fact that creating technology is our nature, and that nature can be a technology. That what is seen as nature and what is seen as technology just depends on our stance towards something. If we see that everything around us can become part of our creative canvas, everything becomes technology.

This particular project aims at building structures from trees of which the growth is controlled by making the trees grow around steel structures, that later can be removed. This way, trees can be made to even grow into each other so they become part of a single macroorganism, like a kind of above the ground rhizome.

This is truly the next step after environmentalism; seeing nature not as something separate that needs to be protected, but as something to be transformed by us to embody a larger and richer variety of human values, synergetically merging with the technologies we already have. Nature is plastic!

windmill skin

Where once our technologies used to be mechanical and centralized, after the invention of electricity the form of products started to be less and less a factor in their functioning. In fact you could even say that we live in a dualistic world, where form and information have become separated. The information surrounding us that we call physical is mostly distinct from the information we say belongs to the mental realm.

With the advent of bio-engineering and nano-manufacturing, this is changing. The material physicality will more and more be able to match the patterns of the electronic; complex, parallel, minuscule and fast. A concept depicting beautifully how new technologies will mean a paradigmatic shift in our manufacturing processes and interaction with technologies is Nano Vent-Skin, by designer Agustin Otegui. He designed a building with an outer layer that can generate energy from the sun and the wind. This skin would consist of nano-scale elements that transform sunlight into electrical energy, and moreover contains tiny turbines that rotate when the wind blows against them, subsequently conferring this energy to micro-organisms that generate electrical energy. The structure also contains nano-wires that can send information about potential failures to a central system, that in turn sends new micro-organisms, so the system can regenerate through self-assembly.

This way, we can integrate functionalities holistically into a structure that hence becomes more like a biological organism than a 'piece of technology'. It all sounds too good to be true.

Here is a link to the website of the project: NanoVentSkin

robotic buildings for korea

The gyeonggi museum of modern art (GMoMA) in ansan city, korea currently has on display an exhibition showing an urban plan for ansan. It's all a bit postmodern and stilistic in design approach, but still the 'beautiful minds' building has an interesting aesthetic to it, merging a typical science fiction expression with a natural one. For some reason it does remind me a bit too much of the murderous robot walkers in 'war of the worlds', especially with those search lights. It seems to be the general view that it's ok to extract the surface qualities if you just paste them onto a different functionality, rather than merging structure and function into a coherent synergy. The 'mutated slabs and robotic towers' proposal is an interesting approach to how reconfigurable, modular buildings might look and behave.

More moving structures

Nothing new here, just listing a few nice moving structures for the sake of inspiration.

Most interesting is the iris dome by Chuck Hoberman. This design seems complex, but it is based on a simple invention; a scissor mechanism with angulated members, so the angle of the elements the scissors connect to remains the same, which allows the structure to expand and collapse to and fro a central point, as in the iris dome. 

Here are a few interesting table designs. The last one is based on the Chebyshev walking mechanism.

Chebyshev walking mechanism, from "Sandler, B.Z. (1999). Robotics. Designing the Mechanisms for Automated Machinery":

What can I say about the following movies. I love these kind of Japanese comments, because not understanding them is ok; you understand what they're saying anyway because of the typical way they're saying it. This was never meant to become a very serious post.

The commercial partly shown at 0:14 of the following movie, about Hoberman's toy expandable spheres is one of my all time favourites. If anybody finds a link to the full movie, I'll post it on this blog.

Brandon Morse's dancing structures

Here's another artist you might want to get acquainted with. Brandon Morse examines instinctual interactions between technological forms and visualizes these in beautiful virtual sculptures. Recently he has worked on one that shows what appear to be two structures, consisting of a rubber-like material, that are connected to the ground, and at the top to each other, as if they were holding each others hands. Now because of the intricacies and complexity of the embodiment of this piece, an exquisitely beautiful and almost human-like physical behaviour emerges. The two structures are literally one, in form and in behaviour. This for me is a visual metaphor for true empathy, honesty, and harmony.

From a technology-evolution point of view, moving structures like this seem a logical step, for example in buildings. It would make everything so much more efficient and beautiful if entities would dynamically adapt to the current situation they are in. To get such a building to become reality, an entire new paradigm of manufacturing processes should be leant upon. One where each element is unique in proportions, adaptive and in continuous communication to other parts of the structure, like its neighbours. And of course products and the interior of the building should also conform to this paradigm. It is evident that an interior based on linear production processes in a physically adaptive, dancing building will be an incredible mismatch. Imagine a static straight floor with static straight furniture on it inside a moving building. All members or organs inside the building need to be active, or conscious on a higher level as one might call it in more mystical temrs, in this connected whole. The transition from static to dynamic technology will not be gradual, but more like a butterfly popping out of a cocoon and suddenly flying away.

It will be very hard to get to this sudden transition, but this is the necessary next step in the material evolution of technology. Where now we are frightened where we see a bridge moving, in the future we should be frightened, similar as with humans, if it is not moving. It is clear to me that this is the new paradigm of design; adaptive structures. Like a new modernism, it will be satisfactory again to design while staying true to the inherent qualities of the manufacturing process, having a coherent and synergetic interplay between both the core and the surface qualities of technological artifacts. So one of my wishes is to see this paradigm come true soon. It will not be easy, as many people of many professions have to be convinced of these deep notions, and the world largely (about 40% according to some study employing the framework of Spiral Dynamics) still pertains to capitalism so it will still be about the money.

Maybe governments will fund this if architects show them a movie of the Twin Towers dancing around and toying with two terrorist planes attacking them, eventually making them crash into each other. And moving with the characteristics of a mild giggle afterwards.

For more work of Brandon Morse, view his video on Flickr of his tugging sculpture, or visit his website.

Hylozoic Soil

Again, a post on physically transforming structures. And again, featuring an artist/architect who was featured at MoMA's exhibition ' Design and the Elastic Mind'.  Philip Beesley makes organic installations that seem to make spaces come alive.

A recent work, Hylozoic soil, is based on hylozoism, the philosophical view that all matter contains life. It is an interactive space that exhibits complex behaviour as you walk through it, as if it wants to absorb you. There are nitinol-activated arms which gently move in reaction to people's behaviour, and pillars that seem to breathe, thus creating an intimate connection between man and machine, rendering the whole a seemingly hybrid organism.

What I like about Philip Beesley is his multisidedness; he integrates an artistic vision, high technology, and unique aesthetics, while also using analytical, rational processes towards the design of his structures, inspired by for example Buckminster Fuller and Chuck Hoberman. What could be expanded upon a lot is the extent of this integration; the behaviour is still quite minimal and seems dictated by technical constraints, as does the visual appearance. The materials used in his structures seem still quite mechanical and hard, much like a frozen spider web. For me it would be a brilliant piece if he would work on a structure that has a seamless soft skin, with an entire decentralized sensor network embedded into it, making for a richly responsive system that could give you really the experience you were part of the digestive system of a technological organism. But maybe that's a little too direct for him. I can also see his structures grow autonomously, perhaps fed by, metaphorically speaking, the empathy the structure gets from the people interacting with it, so the effect is a cross-nurturing of man and machine.

To make this happen of course many disciplines will need to join hands intensively. Especially I'm thinking of genetic engineering for this stuff. Let the great convergence begin!

Make sure to check out his Youtube page if you want to see the installations in action:

http://www.youtube.com/user/pbeesley1234