Lecturers: Tim Schork and Pia Ednie-Brown

In this seminar you will develop skills with the parametric software package Generative Components and learn about related digital fabrication techniques.

These skills will be acquired through designing a thick, permeable indoor/outdoor ‘wall’ that will mediate the transition between kitchen/bathroom and garden, while accommodating a number of systems such as water recycling, compost, plant growers and lights.

You will be asked to approach the design of this ‘wall’ as a semi-living creature, with attention to:
1.    the incorporation of ‘wet’ technical systems, biological and domestic ecologies with a physical structure
2.    how it would be made through digital fabrication techniques
3.    the development of aesthetic coherence or poise using parametrically defined generative systems
4.    the interaction of the ‘creature’ as a whole within a particular site condition and domestic ecology.

As such you will investigate and learn about:

– parametrics and biomimetics

– highly constrained, responsive generative design systems

– domestic sustainable or ‘green’ systems.

– digital fabrication techniques

– intersections of architecture, biological life and ecologies (involving both actual and virtual dimensions)

This seminar is part of a larger teaching and research project called the Biospatial Workshop, building on the research vehicle of a particularly problematic residential site in Thornbury, with the aim of producing more broadly applicable propositions about new ways of approaching ‘sustainable’ living.
This project began last semester with the seminar Contaminated Life. The blog for this subject can be seen here:
www.liveness.org/contaminated-life

In addition to this seminar, this semester we are running studio projects with architecture, fashion, environmental science and audiovisual students.