Omar Kahn - Open Columns Homeostat, Reflexive Architecture Machine 2007

Reflexive Architecture Machines presents a series of architecture machines that reflexively address material and information agency in the forming of space. They re-imagine ways of shaping conventional materials such as rubber, concrete, plastic and wood, using computational strategies to develop more complex relations between parts and wholes. This fundamentally challenges the static nature of these industrialized materials and sensitizes them to the ephemeral and dynamic qualities of the environments in which they are fabricated and eventually deployed. The projects rethink the forms and, more importantly, the tools that will bring them about.

Open Columns is a system of nonstructural columns that residecollapsed in the ceiling of an existing space. They are made from composite urethane elastomers and can be deployed in avariety of patterns to reconfigure the space beneath them. These patterns create gradations of enclosure, either in plan through the full deployment of columns, in section throughtheir partial unfurling to change ceiling heights or through acombination of the two. The system is a mutable architecture that can change the perception and inhabitation ofthe space within which it is deployed. The genesis of this research comes out of an interest in self-organizing systems, which exhibit phenomena of nonlinearity,instability and adaptability. Ilya Prigogine describes physico-chemical dissipative systems, like thermal convection and the Belouzsov-Zhabotinski reaction, which exhibit complex self-organizing behaviors in far from equilibrium states. These behaviors are not deterministic and can yieldseveral responses under the same conditions. The cause for this variety lays in the systems past- some historical event that whose effects can emerge unexpectedly at a later stage in the systems evolution. These qualities are potentially useful for anarchitecture that has to respond to changing needs from its occupants and environmental conditions.
More info: http://www.liminalprojects.com/

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Science & Technology

Tags:

• reflexive
• architecture
• machine
• self-organising
• system
• Gordon
• Pask
• Present