125 the form adapting to the processes, while processes alter over time, adapting in
response to the particular forms of their environment. This includes the built form, something Stewart Brand explores in How buildings learn: what happens after they’re built. (Brand, 1994). This morpho-ecological evolution is a creative act. Novel form is made in this process.
Achim Menges describes morpho-ecologies as the interaction between humans and their environment when linked by a feedback process, resulting in modulations of the whole system. “Emergent organisational effects then facilitate the mutation and mi- gration of human activities” (Hensel, Menges & Weinstock, 2004:81). He sees the rela- tionship between form and humans, or environment and system, as an emergent feed- back system – the built form affects the human system, which then affects the built
form. Because the form-finding process is driven by a self-organising system, the linked system will evolve “in relation to selected performance criteria.” (Hensel, Menges & Weinstock, 2004:93).
Important developers of this approach are Menges, Weinstock and Hensel who make up the Emer- gence and Design Group.
Emergence, they say, requires that we not see buildings as fixed, but rather as “complex energy and
Emergent form gen-
material systems that have a life span, and exist as part of the environment of other build- ings, and as an iteration of a long series that pro- ceeds by evolutionary development towards an intelligent ecosystem" (2004:7).
They use agent-based modelling to find efficiencies through the evolutionary processes associated with complex systems.
The resulting forms are compelling – with an organic yet alien beauty. If aliens are in fact evolving on other planets, they would be subject
to the same processes of complexity as life on Earth, but experience different feedback devices.
Hensel defines traditional form-finding as a one-way, linear process, with a focus on feedback to simple structural requirements and outlines the feedback he is concerned with: first, forces on the material of form: second, “the dynamic relation between material arrangement and human subject” and third “interactions between human subject and environment that assert indirect influence on material arrangements” (2004:29). I find it relevant that he appears to position the human as the ‘subject’ of the built environment. In one section of the book, he describes his ‘post-twin towers’ project:
This design was a parasitic envelope over a twin tower base, required to evolve towards load bearing, volume, circulation, and having a series of interstitial spaces. How- ever, a weakness to this approach is finding a way of interacting with the human subject.
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Figure 30 Hensel's World Trade Figure 30 Hensel's World Trade Figure 30 Hensel's World Trade Figure 30 Hensel's World Trade Centre project page 30
Centre project page 30 Centre project page 30 Centre project page 30
For example, the depth of the final form means there are spaces with no light penetration. Hensel champions a differentially inhabited interior and says “[r]ainforests and the oceans can serve as organisational models, where even in the lowest and darkest regions micro-ecologies flour- ish” (2004:33), presumably meaning the inhabitants will have to adapt to the gloomy inner regions of the structure rather than the structure adapting to the preferences of the human subjects, and provoking images of the evo- lution of pale skinned, large eyed inhabitants, able to be lured from the deep recesses by the phosphorescent glow of computer screens. Rules of efficient inhabitability are presumably very debatable and not easy to pro- gram into the software. At the time Hensel wrote this, he says they are now close to having being able to combine “geometric, structural , material, spa- tial and habitational characteristics” (2004:31).
These socially unresponsive structures are not yet the full response to all the ideas of emergence and complexity theory. Brian Hatton writes in the introduction to Ecstacity “...the phenomenology of 'emergence' has to be found in social narratives and real lives rather than landforms, that com- plexity is generated architecturally more by intersubjective human sponta- neity than by hypersurface geometry" (cited in Coates, 2003:30). To treat the built form as having both the human as a subject and the built form as subject to the human inhabitant would be an aim for habitable design that encompasses complexity theory.
Layering, as a design tool, works with interactions that are unfore- seeable and unpredictable. This can encourage the emergence of new forms
or programmes at the moments of interaction between layers (Gregory, 2003:17). Gregory emphasis that lay- ering allows users to create their own connections and through this, determine the eventual organisation (2003:30).
Without consideration of how layered designs have been inhabited, what types of interactions they have initiated/suppressed and how the larger sys- tems have responded to these changes, it is hard to assess how effective layering is as a specific tool for
131 complex systems.
Recombinant design, too, can be understood as a design tool that encourages emergent designs. Recombi- nant design can accelerate design evolution, the explora- tion of new peaks in the fit- ness landscape of design in the same way that haploid sex accelerated the evolution of species. Various tools of emer- gent form generation are excit- ing ways to evolve design. They are not irrelevant to broad questions of design and complexity, but as I have a focus on urban and landscape systems, I look with particular interest at designs that specifi- cally alter interactions through spatial interventions.