Adaptive Ecologies

Book excerpt: Recent architecture has found itself having to cope with new social and cultural complexities that demand networked systems that are time-based, reconfigurable and evolutionary, and a corresponding model of urbanism defined as an adaptive ecology. It is against this backdrop that the AA's graduate Design Research Lab (DRL) has pursued its recent studio agenda through project-based research focusing on alternative models of housing. Integral to this research is a notion of architecture that looks towards designing systems that seek higher ordered goals emerging through an intimate correlation of material and computational interaction. This book presents the results of this research and with it constructs a generative view of space and structure and the exploration of behaviour based models of living through patterns found in nature.