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Research Cluster 3 interrogates the notion of living architecture as a coupling of living systems with the assembly and formation of architecture. The studio holistically reappraises the linear building life cycle, learning from living systems extraordinary scalable efficiencies of continuously adaptive construction with simple flexible parts. Our research focuses on developing autonomously reconfigurable buildings with situated and embodied agency, facilitated variation, and artificial intelligence.
It seeks to embed local adaptability through experimental design models trained with unsupervised reinforcement learning to self-organise, self-assess, and self-improve in response to unforeseen and changing socio-economic needs and environmental conditions. One thread focuses on physical reconfiguration enabled through autonomous robotic assembly systems that are trained in simulation environments. Real-time control and sensory feedback of physical robotics is managed within bespoke digital twin environments. Another focuses on design models that apply AI to spatial organization of reconfigurable parts to improve at solving multi-objective architectural problems.
This year teams focused on rethinking notions of “home”, “workplace” and/or “factory” as separated building typologies, compressing them into new distributed and adaptive micro-ecologies as autonomous architectural systems that are scalable, reconfigurable, and extendable. Teams developed a new socio-economic models through computational platforms directly coupled with robotically reconfigurable building systems.