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Transcript

2017 UQ Architecture Lecture SeriesTrans-architecturePresented on 11 April 2017

PRESENTED BY:

Adam JeffordAPDL Manager, MC

PRESENTERS:

Kelly GreenopSenior Lecturer UQ Architecture

Muge BelekArchitect

Frederico Fialho TeixeiraArchitect

Chris KnappArchitect

Adam Jefford:

Hi. That was a pretty good response. Welcome. Great lecture tonight. I’m really excited to learn

more about things that I definitely can’t pronounce, but it is really, really interesting stuff.

My name’s Adam Jefford. I’m the manager of the Asia Pacific Design Library. I get the great job

of doing some housekeeping, and of course it is my great pleasure as well to acknowledge the

traditional owners of this land and to pay my respects to their ancestors who came before them

and to the Elders still living today. The location of the State Library on Kurilpa Point was

historically a significant meeting, gathering and sharing place for Aboriginal people, and we

proudly continue that tradition here today.

Housekeeping – toilets are on either level. In the event of an emergency just go to your nearest

door. We will assemble outside the Gallery of Modern Art. As always we are livestreaming and

filming tonight’s event. For any of your colleagues who couldn’t make it tonight, they can

definitely tune in now through our Facebook stream, Asia Pacific Design Library, also through the

UQ Architecture livestream as well, and it will be up on Vimeo in about a week’s time.

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2017 UQ Architecture Lecture Series presented on 11 April 2017by Adam Jefford, Kelly Greenop, Muge Belek, Frederico Fialho Teixeira, Chris Knapp

I should thank the audience again. There has been some fantastic articles being written about

the lectures week on week, and last week was no exception to that. I think we have about 15

articles that came through, so we’re just working through them. Please keep sending them in. We

love to publish them and we love to share them, and of course you guys that are architects, you

get professional points as well. So if you did want to talk about that, please catch me after the

lecture or send us an email. We’d love to do it.

Following along tonight on your phones, which I know are on silent, but of course you can be

hash tagging any of your thoughts all the way along. The hashtag I think is in the right hand

bottom corner, Twitter, Instagram and all of the others.

So it’s my pleasure as always to welcome Kelly to the stage to introduce tonight’s speakers.

Please make her welcome. Thank you Kel.

Kelly Greenop:

Hi everybody, and welcome. It’s great to see you all here again. It’s especially great to see so

many students in the audience. I know that you’re keen to hear about these guys and what

they’re about, because they’re around our school quite a lot.

Before I introduce Fred and Muge, I want to briefly mention the school’s Social Outreach Studio.

And I know I talked about this in the formal terms last week, but I wanted to just give you my take

on it, because the Social Outreach Studio was an idea of mine that I came up with in conjunction

with Sandra Kaji-O’Grady when we had to develop a sort of philanthropic thrust for the school.

And the reason we thought of the Social Outreach Studio is because we like to take students

away. We like to take them on field trips, we like to give them experiences with the public, with

communities. And we’ve had a lot of success with government funding in doing that, but they’re

for very specific students and very specific locations often. So we can’t do that as much as we’d

like, and we know that some students still can’t afford to participate in that, in some other

opportunities that we have.

So we developed the Social Outreach Studio, which is an entirely philanthropically studio. We’re

hoping to run one later this year, and it will mean that all students will get to go and travel into a

community, do a project that means something to a community, in a community that doesn’t

normally get much access to architects. So perhaps in regional Queensland, and if we get

enough money, perhaps in the Pacific. So there’s a lot of great opportunities out there, and we’d

really love you to support it. So if you by any chance sitting in the audience or watching at home

would love to support this, you can Google the UQ Social Outreach Studio and make a donation.

Maybe you’d like to say thanks to us for putting on the lecture series and giving us a little bit of

money in that way. So if you’d like to do that that would be fantastic.

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Now on to tonight’s lecture. We’ve got Frederico Fialho Teixeira and Muge Belek of [f]FLAT

Architecture – Fred and Muge to their friends here in Brisbane as they are now. Muge is a

researcher and part time lecturer at QUT and a design studio leader at UQ. She’s got a BSC in

architecture on collaborative design studio environments from Istanbul Technical University, and

an MArch from the AA Design Research Laboratory. She’s worked in several architectural firms

including Zaha Hadid Architects in London, Istanbul and Brazil. She’s got a PhD, so she’s very

highly qualified to talk about this stuff, on Trans-Architectural Acoustics – and I don’t even know

what that is I’ve got to admit, but I’m super looking forward to hearing more about it tonight –

where she worked for two years with Marcos Novak in University of California Santa Barbara

Translab. So I think we can see some resonances with the name of the lecture tonight, which is

Trans-architecture.

Fred on the other is an architect, a media artist, and he lectures with us at UQ. He initially

graduated in architecture and urbanism and holds a post-grad degree in the history of

architecture from Porto in Portugal. He’s developed his architecture towards an MArch from the

AA, again at the Architecture Design Research Lab, and he collaborates with Muge in their

practice [f]FLAT Architecture. And I’ve already been asked a question about this. Why is it called

[f]FLAT? So maybe that’s something we can send towards Chris later on who’s going to be the

discussant.

So I’d like you all to welcome Fred and Muge to the stage as we hear about their work together in

trans-architecture.

Frederico Fialho:

Hello.

Muge Belek:

Hi everyone.

Frederico Fialho:

It’s going to be exciting, because it’s the first time actually we are doing this together. So

generally people ask one or the other. Maybe it’s going to be an overload, but I hope it will be

okay.

Muge Belek:

Let’s run the show.

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Frederico Fialho:

So we are going to go through trans-architecture, and mainly we are going through kind of the

mode of operation of how we work and how it became such a focus in our practice in a way.

So one way of looking at things is about how do you look at the world, how you perceive the

world, and it’s a generalistic approach, and that’s intentionally what we do. Looking at Ferdinand

Porsche in the 1900s, he developed his first car. It was an electric car. Everybody laughed at

him. Imagine how many problems he would have solved if things were propelled that way.

Obviously it didn’t continue that way.

Within more our field would be Frederick Kiesler. He also developed a vision machine without

any kind of knowledge on what could be an electronic device or interactive device. However the

will to interact with space kind of propelled his designs. Basically what we are going to talk about

is very much the operation that he was going through, and many of our works actually correlate

on to biology and basically developed from his studies and his research.

Muge Belek:

So before we move on to our works, we would like to give briefly an explanation about our

understanding, which is on transdisciplinary. So we’ll be talking about this concept, what it

means. So it was firstly put forward as a key word by Piaget, who was talking about this new kind

of knowledge called transdisciplinary. So one of the protocols of the OECD countries for the

upcoming years is based on this kind of an understanding of disciplinary research, and what it

talks about is quite different than interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary understanding of research.

So here is a diagram of what each of those mean. If we have several disciplines, the

interdisciplinary research works within two disciplines, and the multidisciplinary is like a

combination of all the different disciplinary people working all together. This is a diagram by

[0:09:21]. He talks about these ideas. Whereas according to the idea of transdisciplinarity, these

disciplines by working together after a while passing to a certain time, they start to collapse. So

this is a mathematical kind of diagram which is called the [0:09:46] paradigm. So they attempt to

evolve within time and become a new discipline, and when that happens they’re not trans

anymore and they become another discipline and it’s kind of an evolutionary process. So there

are examples of such.

Frederico Fialho:

From biology to computation biology, where biologists need to become computational engineers.

So now it’s a field. In the ‘70s it was a multidisciplinary kind of situation. So things tend to merge.

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Muge Belek:

And collapse. So it’s an evolution and a new field emerges, and then the system just starts all

over again. So it’s an ongoing type of an understanding of looking at disciplines and the field of

knowledge.

So today we are talking about this merge more often because we are all using similar

technologies, and these technologies allow us to unify different ways of approaching the field of

knowledge. So there is kind of a unity across all the disciplines.

And according to Kume – he talks about the scientific revolutions – he says that scientific

achievements for a time provide a model of understanding, and then when there’s more

knowledge accumulated in that kind of field, those theories might not explain what’s happening

anymore and you would need another way of looking at things. So new theories emerge, new

achievements happen, so there are these thresholds within the evolution of knowledge and with

the evolution of disciplines as well.

So having said that, there is kind of a really great difference between these two understandings

of looking at disciplines and the way we perceive the world. So we can just talk about it in this

way of a chart where disciplinary knowledge is more based on [0:12:10] conditions whereas

transdisciplinary knowledge is based on experience and how we experience the world. So it’s

part of our research where we try to find out new things and we try to create an understanding of

the phenomena rather than claiming knowledge by saying ‘I know this,’ or ‘I know that’. And we

are trying to experience the world through kind of an experience based understanding, where it’s

not an external part of our lives, but we tend to use that knowledge and try to see the outcomes

of it. So it’s kind of looking at the world through astonishment and sharing. So we really

appreciate and value the idea of sharing knowledge and learning from others and learning from

our experiences as well.

So if you look at the world of knowledge, this is kind of diagram where we can really understand

what it means to be a transdisciplinary person or a transdisciplinary researcher. If this is the field

of knowledge and we are looking at with a magnifying glass, the disciplinary research has these

really defined boundaries, and it will be zooming in its own kind of an area, whereas the

interdisciplinary researchers would communicate, but always looking at their own magnifying

glass. And transdisciplinary researchers would say ‘Okay. I don’t have any boundaries in relation

to my – I have boundaries, but they are not as strict. So I’m flexible about knowing other

disciplines and other discipline knowledge and what’s happening within those disciplines’. So the

boundaries become more flexible and more permeable in a way that we can start to learn

different things from each of the disciplines.

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So we mentioned Kume as an important reference point. Those moments of transvergence

happen when there is not enough explanation from the existing theories, and it’s kind of an

unknown trajectory so that we’ll be just exploring. And we have this really interesting

transvergence sound happening now.

So when the existing disciplinary knowledge cannot explain some of the phenomena, then they

start to expand those boundaries and try to find new ways of looking at things and new ways of

understanding the space.

So Marcos Novak – while we spent that time, two years in the Translab, we had a lot of chance

to work with him, and he defines transvergence as a flight to an alien archipelago, and he talks

about leaps and he suggests that this can only be achieved through tactics of derailment. So

what this means is that if we – and this is another diagram. It’s a [0:16:03] diagram. It’s a

scientific type of understanding of where we are in time. So we have an accumulation of

knowledge in relation to our history, and there are general trends that most of the people follow

up. In order to be able to move to elsewhere where we need to be exploring new things, there

has to be something that derails us from that general path of the trends. That’s the claim where

as designers we think that transdisciplinarity can achieve that derailment, and it’s called

transvergence.

So you move from the common ways of knowing and try to find new paths along the way for

yourself, for your understanding. And this can happen in many different scales and many

different mediums. [0:17:13] calls them the plateaus, so that you can just be able to jump from

one way of thinking to another and explore new ideas and new understandings of looking to that.

Frederico Fialho:

One way of looking at the diagram would be now we are in the digital era and in 1994 we are not

allowed to use computing architecture. It was forbidden. Now it’s kind of compulsive. So you

already see the transvergence there. So that’s the practicality of it.

Muge Belek:

Or maybe there was a moment in time when we were talking about the rules of physics and then

they were not enough to explain the phenomena in relation to quantum physics. Then we had the

quantum theory and then maybe it’s not enough to explain the nanoparticles so we had another

technology. It’s always like this, evolutionary and ongoing type of research.

So tonight we’ll be talking about what it means for us and how we see it through our works. So

we’ll be looking through the tools that we use like parametrics, algorithms and interactive tools

and what they mean for us.

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Frederico Fialho:

I mean this is one way of understanding the world, that everybody’s already used to it and

focused on. And so everybody heard about parametric design or algorithms even if you don’t use

it, or interaction design. And those things for us are one part of what forms the whole

architecture, and we cannot separate them. And below there’s some sort of indication of what

this parametricism might mean. For us it’s about producing something. [0:19:14] is maintaining

that production, so keeping some sort of live statement or reaction statement to it, and interaction

is when something from outside interacts with the space. All of them are part actually of

architecture. We are always interacting with space. We are always producing and maintaining the

self, and making or producing architecture is part of our job and this is one way of addressing

that. However we see it from another perspective which we’ll go through further ahead.

So on parametricism, we’ll go and now start on our works. So we started in 2003 and that’s the

first time we went into parametric design. And this was a competition that we got a mention of,

was for the Athens Olympics. And it was a monument where there would be some things

projected and need to act as a Corinthian column, which was the form, the intentional form, but

with a lot of media displays in it.

Muge Belek:

It was like an ephemeral structure. That was the theme of that competition.

Frederico Fialho:

Correct. So this is one way of addressing. We always use animations and fields and dynamic

factors in order to propel our design, because it’s about behaviour of design and how can you

appropriate space. So we pick up on the [0:20:39]. You try to analyse how people are going to

pair through and how information will come out, and that’s what these three measures go

through. But the most important thing about this would be – there’s day views and night views,

but the most important thing would be the next phase that will go, and it’s about the construction

of it.

So the reason that we actually got entangled was at the time there was no panelling tools or

Revits or anything like that. You needed to do everything through Excel.

Muge Belek:

No Grasshopper.

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Frederico Fialho:

Yeah. So basically we connected Maya, which was our tool at the time, to Excel and tried to

actually get all these panels fabricated and explain to everybody how does this work, because

nobody would actually understand and just say ‘Well this is going to be too expensive. It’s not

going to be built’. But it was going to be built, and that’s how we propelled and that’s how we

actually used the systems as Zaha did in order to propel what she did back in 2000.

More on parametric design and fast forwarding – and this is not the chronological order, but the

other type of understandings is about acoustics. We always worked somehow with acoustics. I

don’t really know why. It’s sound, but we always felt attached and everything is…

Muge Belek:

It’s a personal kind of…

Frederico Fialho:

Yeah, but sound is always present everywhere anyway. It is all about vibrations [0:22:08]. And

this was in 2012 in the smart geometries, and we were at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

and we tried…

Muge Belek:

So maybe we should talk about the smart geometries. They might not know. So it’s kind of a

workshop that happens every year in some place in the world where it brings researchers that

would like to experiment more on digital technologies and tools. So it was part of that.

Frederico Fialho:

So basically what we wanted to achieve was a reactive canopy that would react to sound. And

these are the behaviours where you either converse sound or diverse sound in order to – to

certain different situations. Obviously we had kind of an ideal situation, because we were inside

of a [0:22:57] room which was all rigged and allows you a lot of flexibility. So we don’t need it to

build the rigging elements. So these rigging elements that you see here are already established.

So it’s an ideal situation to build something in our own way, which rarely happens because things

tend to be more static.

So basically this was designed with four fingers on this side, which actually react and try to

convey to sound. However on top of sound we actually wanted to be reactive to people and

behaviour, how we would move in. We even went one step further, but it didn’t work out. You will

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see why. So this is all rigged. It’s already established at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and

it would be controlled by an open sound control system which actually is an interaction tool.

We did the normal architectural acoustical analysis. We went into [0:24:04] which the plug in was

also at its first stage. It’s called [0:24:10]. So it was funny to – because usually we use a specific

software called [0:24:16], but in this case everything was so experimental and it allowed us to

get this kind of output. So basically what we wanted – we used this system. We wanted to be

reactive, and basically that’s what we used – [0:24:32]. And this would connect to the winch

system which by itself is going to be controlled by OSC and Max/MSPs, another tool that we use

for production of sound and open sound controls, so interaction design.

Muge Belek:

Like a visual programming language, similar to Grasshopper.

Frederico Fialho:

And also it can connect everywhere because it’s open sound control. So it’s open to all kinds of

sources. One thing we wanted to do as well would be mind control. That didn’t work out so fast,

because you needed to be so calm in order for our brainwaves to be scanned properly.

Otherwise if you’re feeling excited it doesn’t sketch and the whole thing starts moving erratically,

and so it didn’t work. But probably now it might be better because the sensors are better. We are

following that path as well.

And this is basically a video of what we did and how it was assembled.

So the whole rigging you see, so we are obviously in the ideal situation. It’s a [0:25:57]. This is

where their performance is. They record performances here, and there’s all these rigs that can be

controlled by OSC, open sound control, because it always allows [0:26:09] systems or interactive

systems always have some sort of OSC open channel open to it. So we needed to [0:26:19] and

fabricate everything of this, and that’s where parametrical tool came in, because we didn’t know

how this would be kind of folding. So all that needed to be controlled and kind of simulated in

[0:26:33] beforehand.

So after that the whole project took 12 days, and we were just part of it. It’s not our project, but

we contributed for all that’s happened. And the problem here is that the rigging, once you move

things, because you have such a big beam, it starts to balance. So you also need to control the

open systems and interaction, otherwise it starts to become very unbalanced and it doesn’t

create the – you will see that move sideways just by moving the fingers.

So a lot of [0:27:18] going down there, and you see here now – we’ll see far ahead people

interacting and interacting with – when you moves the arms up one [0:27:29] falls out but moving of 24


forwards and backwards it would start reacting both to sound and behaviour if you want it.

Obviously it was only focused on sound, but we got into the [0:27:46] about interaction. We’ll try

to explore that field. That’s part of the trans element. You see potentials everywhere that are not

directly linked to it, to the design, but there are potentials and elements that can actually be part

of it.

Muge Belek:

So you attempt to derail along the way of the design process where you start to explore new

things and you want to know more about it. So sometimes they fail and most probably [0:28:16] that are failing here in this presentation.

Frederico Fialho:

Yeah. There’s a lot of failures, and we were part of those. And even the fabrication had other

elements for diffusers and things like that that were going to be activated with [0:28:31] but they

didn’t work.

In any case, on parametricism this is how we generally design. We are designer. We just design

a system, and there’s some sort of input and output but it’s not directly connected. So there’s

kind of a passive mode of behaviour into the whole parametric design. And that’s one thing that

triggers to have the – these are algorithms. Okay. So the feedback. So that’s one thing that

makes everything automated and creates a response that is unexpected, but they are more

natural to the algorithm, to the design then you. So we are not in control of the design itself. You

are in control of the behaviour of the design, and that’s one thing that gets you going and gets

very, very interesting, because that will never cross your mind.

Muge Belek:

So this project is called the Biophotonic Avatar which we designed in 2006. It was again another

competition entry. And we started analysing some of the understandings of how the plants work

by means of trapezium, so how they respond to an environment and how they act. So if you see

the time lapse video of this plant you see how it moves and how it reacts within the time change.

Frederico Fialho:

One extra element that’s interesting for us here is that you don’t have any rigging in a plant. It’s

embedded on the behaviour. You don’t have any muscles either. So we don’t actually need

muscles to make things move. It’s some sort of a trapezium, and that’s what mimosa has, and it

reacts to certain conditions of environment. And it’s consequential. So basically once you touch

this element, that leaf in front of the other, that needs to be collected. It’s not general behaviour.

So that gives you [0:30:41] basically on the unit. Not the control of the whole plant itself, but one of 24


unit gets controlled and the whole behaviour gets appropriated by the plant. And this is what

happens once you are looking at that kind of trapezium through a microscope, and this is

basically what plants do is they create more fluid or less fluid in order to create tension, in order

to be open or closed and fold down. So there’s obviously [0:31:20] and things work on that

manner. And that’s what basically reacts to that.

What we wanted is the plant also reacted to sound. So if you put heavy metal it tends to close. If

you put Tchaikovsky it blossoms again. And it’s not because it likes one more than the other, but

it’s basically because of sound. So in sound, if you analyse sound, it’s basically this is how a

particle of sound evolves. An attack, so the propulsion of and the decay of it doesn’t sustain, and

the release. So that’s when the sound falls off. And it’s all particle related. And this is what we

tried to do. We wanted to have one leaf that would react to that kind of sound and situation. So

it’s a parametric design in a way, however you are not parametricising the geometry, you are

parametricising the behaviour. And this is the matrix of behaviours. That’s what it is. The unit is

here, so sectional behaviour, [0:32:28] behaviours, and you have a matrix of these which would

allow us to get the flexibility and whatever – that element could be appropriated in space and how

it would react to sound and the environment itself.

So with that, only with that kind of matrix, these things can occur. And you don’t need to control

all of them. You need to control one and it informs all the others.

And this is basically what goes through. There’s a bit of calling here, but the most important thing

is the noise, the former, the parametricisation of the frequency so it reacts to frequency, pitch and

all the ADSR, so the attack and release of the sound. So all of these are actually reacting to that

kind of an element, and this is how it could actually be propelled put in the environment and it will

adapt to different situations and also [0:33:28] situation, and we would go and have [0:33:28] because it’s our arrangement, it’s live. We always tend to do animations in order to be self-

explanatory, and this is basically how it works.

Here we use microsounds. Microsounds are particles of sound that are not longer than one

microsecond, and we compose those in order to trigger this. So once you use microsounds you

know you are controlling particles of sound. So it’s easier to actually put anything in the

environment and you know that you are controlling that frequency, that pitch of that particle of

sound, not so much any sound. And it might react to any sound whenever [0:34:11] to it. So this

is kind of how the algorithm runs.

Muge Belek:

And you don’t really know the exact outcome of the algorithm. You have an understanding of it.

You are in control of it as a designer. But because it has its own type of logic embedded into it, it

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will react in ways that it learns out of that experience. So with this one, this is a sound that it is

kind of reacting to, and it behaves…

Frederico Fialho:

So we don’t animate the whole thing, we animate one element, and that element informs the

other just like the mimosa, and starts to create and adapt to this kind of environment. And this is

not an environmental condition, so it is not outside in the world which is so much more

information, and this is only reacting to sound. There’s no light. There’s nothing. And it starts to

do all these kind of weird things that we didn’t expect but became part of the animal.

Muge Belek:

And this project was much before than the Monterey project, so we had kind of a vision of how it

might reflect upon kind of a build structure, and we had talked about it on a conference for

acoustical engineers and they were really amazed with the potentials of what reactive acoustics

might trigger when you embed sensors into a structure and if they start to get this information

from its surroundings and act accordingly.

Frederico Fialho:

And this is where we might answer the question a bit at least. More question marks to Kelly. This

is what we understand of trans acoustics. Acoustics generally is the controlled sound, however

we actually think there could be an interaction of sound and another way of experiencing it. So

that’s I guess…

And on algorithms again, we started to figure out – and this time we went to California and we

were with Marcos at Translab at University of California, Santa Barbara at the California

Nanosystems Institute. So we are within a biological nanosystem institute where you see all

these guys dressed up with white, like X Files. And you question what are they doing and what

are we doing here? The reason why they put people there is to immerse art and science, and has

a very practical purpose with creating visualisations and interactions. However there’s so many

other things that can transpire from that, and basically that’s how the whole artistic media arts

realm evolves within those parameters and you have the same thing at [0:37:14]. You have

invited artists and things can be propelled and be experienced in a different way, so in a way

transverged.

So this is [0:37:23]. And one question is – when architects use genetic algorithms, our question

is why do they always look the same? I mean we have genetic algorithms. Look at us. You know,

this is our world. And if you look, they’re all different and you experience it different and they look

different. So if they’re all buildings, we belong here, and the animals obviously between this

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slime, mould and the fungi. They might sort something out. But anyway, if you want to do this or

this in architecture, how do you design the algorithm? That will be a question that is not really

explanatory on all the algorithm designs that you see in architecture. And one way of addressing

it would be how this process of genetic algorithms and generally morphogenesis react, and this is

how they react and this is a view of a microscope. The nanoparticles in water, how do they

interact with each other? And that’s basically how cells are so developed. And this is called

[0:38:39] in motion, and every cell can be traced and has its own behaviour. The way they move

and react and displace [0:38:46] themselves through space is about chemical reactions and

signalling. So they send a signal through chemicals in order to react, and they displace

themselves. There is no randomness into this behaviour, but the way they get together then,

that’s another element.

So all this occurs within a cell and starts – the multi-cell element starts to evolve and there’s a

cell migration, and through kind of different [0:39:14] and proportions and chemical reactions you

start to have these kind of different type of elements of cells that will actually create the body. In

this case it’s a dragonfly. And that’s how cells and basically all the animals and plants are

actually evolved from.

And one algorithm only based on sponges – this is the amount of things that you can have. They

don’t look the same. They don’t act the same. So we wanted to go through these type of

elements. So we did exactly that. We picked on one cell because it’s a [0:39:54] element, and

then there’s a split and the cell differentiation. And with one cell different set ups, and you get

totally different outcomes. Obviously the cells are always the same and you can – calling this

decoding. So we decoded basically a lot of the morphogenesis kind of behaviours, and we coded

them into their functionality and that’s what gave us these kind of elements.

Muge Belek:

The way it interacts is you have a core cell and we just increase the number of core elements or

the way they will react to different conditions, and once they start to interact with each other the

congregation happens.

Frederico Fialho:

So there’s this element called the signalling distance. That’s one of the parts of the chemical

reactions. That’s very important. Some chemical reactions actually propel other cells or go further

than others, and that’s what allows this kind of element. We picked on this signalling for we

already know it works, because it could actually be appropriated. And again another video trying

to depict what we did.

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So basically those forms actually are these ones, and what you see – this is not one cell. The

changing of colours, the gradient, is like cells being born and dying, as they do, and if they

connect they start to generate a body. So you see they start the signalling. So they’re the arms.

And they start creating this kind of element, that physical element that starts to be propelled in

space. You see that one will eventually fade away because it’s not connected to anyone.

So through all this, again in Maya – because it’s traced we have more than 5,000 kind of little

elements like this, and this only takes kind of 30 seconds, and obviously it’s a controlled

morphogenetic environment. And the outcome is this. It’s totally unexpected. You wouldn’t model

– I mean you can model, but I don’t know the logic that would infer. But it’s accurate. It’s

parametric. And this is a 3D print of that. So you can actually fabricate these things nowadays

and try to promote other systems.

So this is the part of algorithmic that we are interested in. So it incorporates the parameters, but

in a behavioural sense not in a fabrication one. However the fabrication is a critical component.

The last I think step will be on interaction. That’s where things really spin off. But it’s about the

system itself. So whatever you saw before, it was always constrained to an environment and

modelled within an environment, and you generally tend to do it that way. What if we can put

these things and interact them with the external world? So that algorithm would actually behave

differently. And that’s what comes off. The designer becomes part outside. So you actually put it

on the environment. You are at the same level of the environment. Note you are not part of the

system, you are not designing the system. The system has its own feedback, however its own

feedback responds to the input and output, which is something that gets totally out of control.

What you can do is control the code, nothing else. And even the code reacts differently to other

kinds of situations.

Muge Belek:

And you also learn from that experience itself. So it’s not like a linear process, you do something

and you know the result of it in such a way. Sometimes you cannot foresee what’s going to

happen.

In this case this was as part of an exhibition element that we designed. So we are seeing the

physical model of the environment we called [0:44:18] where each node is a creation of that

script that we have talked about, and the way they interact with each other, they tend to generate

new formations, cell formations. And the built model has its own type of sensors embedded on to

it so that when you get closer to it you’re also informing the system which is connected to a

virtual world that…

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Frederico Fialho:

So what’s important is on this motion where we took out the [0:44:59] from the morphogenesis,

what if this is not nanoparticles? What if these are people? Because you stroll around in space.

Obviously there’s intention into it, but still you are always attracted to something or you are

cognitive of [0:45:14] responding to the stimulus of the space and therefore you move

accordingly. So yes, it’s different moving patterns, however the principle is fairly similar.

Muge Belek:

So the way you engage with the system is through a game pad as well as it has some infrared

sensors and some microphones. So it also detects your [0:45:38] systems with the model. And

through those sensors it starts to trigger events happening within that virtual environment and

also along the…

Frederico Fialho:

The intention for this [0:45:52] as well as the cell signalling process is there are different

chemical reactions that actually extend more and more or less and less. So the sensor is fairly

one metre close and you react to that one. The microphone gets the sense of the sound in the

space and there’s obviously the game pad for interaction. And the activators, we will go through

that. So all those things are connected and they react, and they’ll be the activators reacting to

that. So on that specific piece that you just saw in the previous photo, there are some [0:46:26] that we’ll go through those things.

So the activators are basically memory alloys which actually basically act on the same element

as [0:46:36]. So once you put some heat on it they deform and they create other shapes. So

these antennas in a way attract the person or it makes you move around and try to interact with

the piece. Also the interaction – that serves for serving for a physical interaction so people get

attracted, you get closer, so then the sensor gets you another level of interaction. So you start

understanding things are becoming more responsive to you, not so much towards the

environment. And that will have an inference on what the projection is going to be and how it can

interact with that virtual world in a way as well as the sound. The sound also plays a big role, and

that’s maybe why we use sound in the [0:47:26] manner, because if it’s too calm – you want to

make the environment lively, make a big noise. And the whole algorithm is running and actually

running through the environment and analysing if there’s less level of sound or a high level of

sound, and it reacts to that as well. So it’s not open only towards the algorithm itself, but towards

the environment.

And this is how the memory alloys work. So basically you just have the interactions with Windows

or Firefly, and in our case we didn’t even use those, we use Max/MSB. And once you put some

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power into it it creates tension and that makes everything move basically. And once you turn it off

it has a cool off period just like the mimosa.

So this is basically how the whole thing worked.

Muge Belek:

The users interact with the system through the game pad. So they can move around the virtual

space. And also the infrared sensors detect the person’s existence along with the model. The

microphones record the sounds, and all these things feed into the algorithm which has various

outcomes. Some are more kinetic, some of the activators start to move, the model responds to

you in such way, and the visual elements, the virtual environment will start to have different

events happening. So you move around that virtual environment, try to see the different parts of

that world, and the sound as well, it has kind of an algorithm that it would respond to the

environment in a different way. And that will use [0:49:16] sounds and additives in the [0:49:19] to achieve that outcome.

Frederico Fialho:

So this is in 2007, and there was no Oculus at that time, but there was a big projection and

basically you were allowed to move as you move freely in VR games now. And basically you see

here this little wire and the antennas. That’s what makes the whole thing kind of move. So you

actually can react. Because other people tend to either react more to physical elements than to

the virtual, at least at that time. Probably now it will be reversed. Then once you start to interact

with this, this thing will also change and the sound as well, so you can actually control with the

game pad – there was no iPad at the time – or you can have your own sonic experience and start

playing with the sound scape in a way instead of interacting with anything else.

This will be a bit of – if you had that game pad on the hand, there will be different elements. And

basically once you’re travelling through the virtual world, some of these – this one is stable, but

many of the other elements are also dynamic and they react to things that you are behaving like

sound. And once you are in the virtual environment, if you are expressing yourself not physically

but in the virtual environment, the virtual world, and the antennas would also react on to

displacement on the virtual not on the physical. So there’s a lot of information going on, and it’s

more like a transactive situation than an interactive one. So we don’t really know what the other

side is going to give you, because on an interactive environment now we start to play with them

and you know the behaviours and you start controlling them. In this case the whole world will shift

its behaviour according to – in this case it’s just reacting to the environment itself. The previous

one – the virtual environment itself. The previous one was about sound and changing the colours

and people would move freely in this.

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Also there’s these cells coming on board which are now very kind of – there’s a lot of

architectural projects made on those, but those things actually are [0:51:41] of behaviours and

they try to move in flux, and they depict that so people try to follow them. They would run away

and there was all these kind of elements that could be experienced in a virtual world that could

not be in the real world.

Muge Belek:

So the last project we will talk about is the One plus One Equals Three, Systems of [0:52:08] Communication, which was part of an exhibition that was run in MoMA in Istanbul, Modern Art

Gallery. And I believe one of your future lecturers, Alexis [0:52:24] and [0:52:26], they will be

also giving a lecture. And they were also part of the exhibition, so you’ll be seeing some of their

works as well.

In our case we had kind of a pop up space which would be utilised from time to time. So we think

of creating this virtual environment where people could come in and engage with and experience

the space, and through that engagement they will learn new information or new ways of engaging

with space, which is not an everyday experience. So you would have to use kind of a tool, which

was a smartphone in this case, and you would move through space with that smartphone and

you would be experiencing these virtual happening events through that experience.

Frederico Fialho:

Basically what you would have – you downloaded our geometry. So there was a movie playing, a

physical movie, so it was there, you could sit in front of it, about the geometry moving around. But

on top of that there would be an app that you could download from Dropbox. It would be an

augmented reality one. You put your iPhone or iPad facing that. You have an overlapping of the

geometry, so you can actually move around and get in part of the movie, so inhabit the movie as

well and it would allow you to play with those things as well as sound again.

And this is a trial, so we were trying to play on the computer. There’s obviously the QR code.

That’s the whole thing that triggers everything. There’s also the geo-locator, but since we were in

a building we could not be geo-located. So we opted for the safer version, and the QR code gives

you different glimpses of what kind of geometry and how can you interact with geometry. So

basically you can see this is photos from the iPhone and over a computer, not even the movie

itself.

So basically what we did here was we eradicated the whole part on the physical and we went

basically virtual with the sound. And that’s where sound becomes very pervasive in a way,

because it can be [0:54:45] but it’s very, very natural and actual for everybody. It’s always

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present. But the structure is very similar. There’s an interaction between the sound, the visual

and the algorithm and the user itself.

And this one unfortunately we don’t have movies. We didn’t capture it. So once you get into the

space you get that big – this would be the movie and then once you go through and move

yourself – and there’s different QRs coming up – you can experience the form and the geometry

and try to understand what could be expected from that space. Not on the projecting matter, but

actually on semi-actual matter, because it’s augmented reality basically what we are doing.

I mean basically we tried to go through these things, however what we really go through is this.

And this is how we operate, and these are the actual definitions of those. So we work on a

poiesis. It’s a parametric mode – on autopoiesis, on a system that’s actually reacting and

maintaining itself. It’s in a constrained environment. And then the allopoiesis, where a system

creates something other than itself. So it’s always open for external communication.

Muge Belek:

So that we also learn from that experience and the behaviours.

Frederico Fialho:

So in models – so models is all of these – and generally everybody starts using until here, since

we are architects, or probably the majority is, until 3D plus time it can get architecture, because

you need to experience space. The only additional element with the four dimensional is all the

complex geometries and now all the technology on the virtual and augmented world that can give

you higher dimensions and can give you other outputs. Because there’s a jump from models to

those dimensions and then operating through different types of modalities. So most of us

experience space in a different way. It’s very dependent on what’s your experience.

So what for us trans-architecture might mean might come off like this. Spatial expression of

creativity across and beyond human taxonomies. So basically it’s designing beyond disciplines.

Thank you.

Muge Belek:

Thank you.

Kelly Greenop:

Thanks Fred and Muge for an incredibly – for me anyway – challenging and rich lecture. You’ve

explained – at least I now know what transacoustics is, so that’s fantastic. I’d like to invite Chris

Knapp up to the stage. Chris is an assistant professor at the Abedian School of Architecture at

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Bond University, and he’s also been a director of Studio Workshop, a Gold Coast design practice

since 2015. So like Fred and Muge he has an interest in parametricism as well as practice, so we

thought he’d be an excellent person to open the discussion tonight.

Chris Knapp:

Thanks Kelly, and thank you very much for that presentation. That was really fascinating. Thanks

to all the people in attendance tonight.

I’ve written down a lot of questions. So I’ve got to just take a minute to collect my thoughts and

think about where to start. I think my lien of enquiry, to just try and unpack what we just

experienced a bit, might be geared a bit towards the fact that we have quite a lot of students in

the audience tonight, and maybe to ask kind of a very dumb question just to get things going.

Should all of the keen bean architects, future architects in the audience all be rushing out and

making sure that they learn to code? Do you see coding as an essential skill for the discipline

moving forward, or if one chooses not to, maybe what are the ramifications of that?

Obviously you have a bias given the way that you’re approaching things, so maybe there’s an

obvious answer to that question. But you hear the idea of people learning to code is like we need

to teaching kindergarteners and first graders to learn to code or to learn how to use Arduino,

etcetera, etcetera. So I’m interested in that in kind of more of a broader implication.

Muge Belek:

It’s a new kind of communicating with the tools that we have. So I see it more like a language. If

you want to communicate with that type of an environment then you should definitely learn. And

now as we are architects or designers we tend to think more visually, so the visual coding or

visual programming is much easier than many people would think of. So I think if you want to

learn a new language and communicate through that language, then you should definitely learn

it.

I don’t really believe that we should be ignoring it in such a way that what happened in the initial

ideals of when digital tools became apparent, and I don’t think that we should be taken by it fully

so that we forget who we are or who we are designing for. So it’s just a tool that if you want to

experiment with it then you should learn it. It’s a personal choice. That’s how I see it.

Frederico Fialho:

The code I think is just another language. It’s just an artificial one. So it’s basically how to learn

English or French or – however the computer is far less forgiving than anybody else. For non-

English speaking people you still can maybe understand me, but computer, if you make a syntax

error then there it appears, syntax error, and then that’s a big blockage. So that’s a big of 24


difference, but again it’s all about creativity and if your creativity is pushing you, driving you

through coding, you should go for it.

Muge Belek:

Because it’s opening up a new way of seeing the world as well, like any other language. So if you

want to experiment those world views – today it’s coding. A couple of years ago it was like

[1:01:46] surfaces. So it’s always changing in a way. I think that’s one of the challenges. You

always need to develop yourself in such a way that you should be open to newer things, and God

knows how we’ll communicate in the future as architects with our design tools. It’s always

changing.

Chris Knapp:

So I guess a further question then. You raised the issue of failure. You touched on that a bit.

Maybe it was the Manta project, talking about things that would be sort of unpredictable or certain

conditions and that system would fail. Things like coding, and as you just said things like syntax

errors, there’s a real precision and discipline to using coding or visual algorithm languages.

So how does one I guess build in the space for failure? How does one – I mean this is kind of a

tricky question that probably all architects wrestle with in various forms or another. But through

your kind of lens, do you have kind of a philosophy or an intuition or a procedure that kind of in-

builds chance? I mean this is I think one of the issues there’s kind of a debate around, where

does authorship reside, and if you’re so kind of controlling on one hand with how something

needs to be authored or contrived versus just letting the algorithm do its thing, then what you get

is what you get and at a certain point you’re relinquishing control to the script if you will.

So how do you think about failure or even sort of unexpected outcomes in the work?

Frederico Fialho:

The thing about coding is that it’s an iteration. So you start evolving it right. It just doesn’t pop up

as a brilliant idea, and you keep on working on it. So we have iterations that are going to work

eventually, but since we are always pushing it – similar to an architectural project, the deadline is

there but you are always designing until two days before. You’re always changing something. So

coding is very much the same. You have iteration that works. It’s not the one that you wanted,

but it does some sort of the job. And that way you can deal with failure, because you know that

you have something safe because you went through so many roads, and one element is going to

be working.

Might not do everything that you stand for, but still since everything is so new and obviously

because it’s far detached from practice, that’s an important point. But those are the ones that do of 24


not allow failure, because there’s a lot of dollars involved. But since you are in academia, I think

we should push towards successful failures. So that’s actually experimentation. That’s the basis

of experiment. If you are not having failures then you are not experimenting. You are just

acquiring knowhow. So that’s my view.

Chris Knapp:

So given your experience working for Zaha Hadid, known as a very experimental sort of

[1:05:17] practice, I guess can you maybe relate or convey how something like failure or sort of

risk taking unfolds in a space like that?

Muge Belek:

You might get a vase on your head. There were times of failure there as well.

Chris Knapp:

But the stakes are higher I guess.

Muge Belek:

Yeah. And it was also mostly on experimentation too. So there would be times which some ideas

would be tested and they would be tested throughout different types of competitions and different

items of typology or form making or – yeah. So you would see a variation of a similar kind of an

approach, and sometimes they would succeed and sometimes they would not. So that was the

part when failure would – so they don’t really get to build everything they propose. And the time

when we were there, the office was kind of shrinking in such a way that we were 40 people left,

and now it’s 600. So surely they learned from their failures.

Chris Knapp:

Clearly. Just maybe a different line of questioning. The morphogenetic projects, so discussing

kind of nanoparticles and some of these kind of behavioural analyses and things like that, sort of

local interactions of things, and then talking about I guess designing a set of discrete parameters

for a system and a system of particles that relate to each other etcetera. And then what we saw

in the work was depicted as either a virtual projection or kind of a model which maybe is

presumably something that represents a building, but depending on how you classify what a

building is or a sort of conventional idea of architecture is, it may be harder to classify.

I guess this is just a question that’s about clarifying how you think of the work as either being

literally – when you’re working at that cellular level do you think of it as we’re working on

something which is one to one, we’re at the scale of something cellular, or do you think of it as

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this is analogous to say a city – you mentioned how these particles could be exchanged for

bodies in space, in physical space. So I guess I’m interested how you might conceive of that.

When you’re working on say a research question around the tools that you’re investigating, do

you sometimes see them as analogues for different scales of things, or do you tend to think of

them as more discrete and localised?

Muge Belek:

I’m really glad actually you asked this question, because I’m sure everybody has this doubt in

their mind. Is this really architecture or can it be a built in moment, if you look at through that

perspective.

Chris Knapp:

Like where are the toilets, what everyone’s thinking.

Muge Belek:

But I think what we think is – I’m talking the both of us – it’s part of the experimentation that we

throw out these complex studies, we learn a lot, and we see that most of the tools or most of the

things that we find out become part of the field. Like if you were to talk about the first initial

project that we showed, maybe kind of overlay the [1:09:22] pieces, nobody was really

understanding it at the time but they become part of the reality. So we see them mostly as our

playground where we experiment and we learn the tools and techniques and then we implement

those to [0:09:42]. But we can do it much easier because they are much clearer in such a way

that we can engage much easier. That’s how I see it, as our playground.

Frederico Fialho:

Yeah. It’s one to one. You see the particle as a particle, and again the same thing – that departs

from Kiesler’s work where the elemental is elemental, and it’s not analogue or metaphorical at

any point. We are lucky enough to have the tools to experiment with those while Kiesler didn’t,

but he did some challenging propositions which actually are occurring now virtually 100 years

later already. And he actually mentioned the chemical cell, the biological cell, and how can you

interact through those elements, not as a mode of spatial interaction but as a behaviour encoded

kind of principle that would afterwards get reciprocated into a space. So that’s basically what we

are doing. It’s not really ground-breaking.

But the interesting thing is the nanotechs are coming, and we are being able already to code

material. How are you going to code that well? That’s going to be critical and that will – maybe. I

don’t know. I mean there’s already walls that are being coded maybe more mechanical, but the

nanotech is also going to offer you that versatility on the materiality, and then it will become of 24


current practice. So we are on our path, but eventually we’ll all get engulfed in and become

practice oriented in a way. It’s just an ideal situation.

Chris Knapp:

So in terms of I guess the outcomes or maybe where this is headed – picking up on the notion of

the trans or I guess the transvergence, the trans-architecture – in I guess your world view or the

set of procedures or approaches that you’ve set up – I see you guys as thinking of the architect

as kind of the medium where different world can kind of meet and you’re using your tools to kind

of translate the way that those things come together. So with respect to let’s say the ability to

code material and suggest the idea of say transmateriality perhaps, what areas of convergence

or let’s say transformation do you think are maybe the most exciting or the ones that you’re

wanting to push your work towards? Or maybe as a parallel question, what peer practices or

other practices say internationally do you guys look at and see operating in that space and

starting to take it to some fruitful places, like Skylar Tibbits or those you mentioned before.

Frederico Fialho:

So there’s Tibbits, there’s Mark [1:12:53] – he’s England - and there’s Oxman. But at some point,

some extent, their work, especially their latest article on Entangled – not all the works he

proposed, but some of them that actually are interacting with the molecular level. And there’s

many of the more art oriented projects we look at than architecture, obviously because even

within biennales and things, things are very, very constricted on this kind of level. But you can

see the [1:13:32] Tibbits is coming out. There is going to be a lecture on coding material or

materialism kind of a thing in the next month coming up. So it’s going to start propelling, and if it’s

on MIT it’s going to obviously propel somewhere else.

So there was people that we started [1:14:02], but back in the day when they were trying all

these interaction elements with that big wall [1:14:10] or the kind of triangulation where all the

things happen. But it was dynamic, so all those things were – yeah, cars as well, hyper bodies.

But they are not nanotech, but they react and interact and even transact. So the technology is

changing. At the moment I’m not aware of any practice that actually is using – besides academia.

Muge Belek:

Gehry has that research group they just implemented within their office. I think that was a big

leap for their office, because they’re building in many, many places all over the world so they are

open for a certain level of experimentation with the Gehry technologies.

Frederico Fialho:

Zaha did something similar which is – there’s a part of a research group integrated with… of 24


Muge Belek:

So things are changing. There is more experimentation, and especially if you are designing your

own tools. Then you really stick out within this world of open source coding. It’s not just about

hacking some codes and bringing them together into an amalgamation and – but it’s more about

exploring new grounds and doing more research in a way. So things will probably get more to

that kind of an understanding of design. It’s all about tool making.

Chris Knapp:

Saving time. I’ve got Kelly doing the hovers.

Muge Belek:

We were really happy here chatting.

Kelly Greenop:

You’re really happy but I’m going to have to say thank you very much to Chris, Fred and Muge

for the discussion and for the lecture tonight.

The reason we have to finish is we’re nearly out of time. But before we finish tonight we need to

announce the Arch-I-Spy winner for this evening. And, this week’s winner is Clown Dwellers,

known to us in and around the school of architecture as Jason Haig. So if Jason’s here, we’ve

actually got his pack down the front. But I can’t see him in the audience, so we will arrange to get

that to him soon. A gorgeous photo of some brickwork which we know he’s completely obsessed

with, so a totally appropriate photo for him to win with.

And my final duty of the evening is to remind you that we’ve got a two week break now for Easter

and Anzac Day, and we’ll see you back here on the 2nd of May for the second half of the series

for more lectures. We’re starting off with an exciting double header from Atelier Chen Hung. The

director Melody Chen is joining us, along with another young practice, Maytree Studios. The

founder Rebecca Caldwell and Emily Dukes, an associate are going to be joining us. Three

women architects with young practices from Brisbane on stage talking to us about how they’re

running their innovative practices. So I think that should be another fantastic lecture.

But thanks again to Muge, Fred and Chris for tonight.

[End of Transcript]

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