Building Design Genes

In previous years we started by trying to find the genes, but we think it makes sense that this comes after you have familiarised your selves with the systems. Therefore this year we have defined 10 systems for you to grow.

We are making progess with identifying the genes of buildings, but there is still a lot of work to do:

What is the relationship between systems, stages and genes?
What is the realtionship between genes and morphogens?
Which of these elements map to the Design Grid?

In this course we have defined the systems

In [A2] defined the lines, segments and features of your systems
In [A3] you defined the stages of your systems.

Architectural Genotype

‘The [architectural] types that are physically created support and promote the values, social relationships,and patterns of activities that are dominant in that society at that time’ (Franck, 1994, p. 345). Hence it is only when the dominant values of a society change that the types of buildings can change. It therefore matters where the genotype is stored. Is it cultural, inside the user, the environment, the designer or encapsulated in our common understanding of the architectural typology as a conveyer of cultural values? Hillier (2007) presents the idea of architectural genotypes as an underlying spatial logic of architecture. Inthis sense the phenotype is the material architecture. In biology the phenotype is the result of thegenotype and epigenetic and non-inherited environmental factors. The biological phenotype’sevolutionary response is imprinted in the organism’s DNA genotype. In addition, the organism’s‘phenotypic plasticity’ - or ability to adapt to its environment during its development – would need to beaccommodated in a genotypical description of architectural typologies. From an architectural perspective,Gero and Kazakov (1998) presented the idea of ‘design genes’ which they proposed could be used toinform spatial organisation. Architectural genotypes could provide a wholly new way of looking atarchitecture.

(8) (PDF) Suburban Mutations: Towards the Multi-Dimensional Appropriation of Science in Architecture. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311454828_Suburban_Mutations_Towards_the_Multi-Dimensional_Appropriation_of_Science_in_Architecture [accessed Sep 07 2023].

The phenotype and genotype have been previously discussed in architecture through the lens of genetic algorithms (Maher and Poon, 1994) (Damsky and Gero, 1997). Morphogenetic Prototyping revisits these terms in their source discipline. In biology a phenotype describes an organism’s observable traits that can bemeasured. These observable traits are the result of genotypic expression. In this way the traits that wecan observe in an animal or plant can be thought of as the result of the expression of genes. Beforebiologists could sequence (read) an organism’s genotype directly they had to infer the expression of genesby making comparisons of similar phenotypes. Developmental biology knowledge has itself grown frombeing able to make phenotypic observations through comparative biology combined with anunderstanding of the role of genes in the development of the organism. In comparison to architecture,the challenge is that we are still in the process of identifying and comparing (pheno)types and have notyet progressed to a genotypic analysis. Traditionally in biology the relationship between these conceptsis expressed as:genotype + environment → phenotypeTherefore, if we know the phenotype (presuming that we take this to be an architectural typology)and we imagine that we could encode the influence of the environment, the bit left over must be thegenotype. So the equation above could be rearranged as:Architectural (pheno)type – environment → (Architectural) genotype

The design of buildings finds it difficult to reach automation etc. because projects are always taken as unique. There are good reasons for this.
But as Architectural Engineers we need to find a more scientific way to understand, model, design and analyse buildings, whilst not reducing their architectural ‘uniqueness’.

The diverse disciplines of the building industry make it difficult to have a singular approach.

Architectural and building science represents a dvierse collection of perspectives, that lack a common core perspective.

To address this, Morphogenetic Prototyping uses the lens of biology to support structured analysis of design. It is less about bio mimicry and more about imagining how a biologist how had never experienced artificial design would explain it.

This raises a number of questions, not least of which is:

using the lens of biology could we identify the genetic code of buildings?
Could we edit that code to create new improved designs?
having modelled the code of one buldign code we do it for older buildings, to create an evolutionary model of buildings?

We borrow the concepts of ‘genes’ from Biology to help.

The metaphor of genes in design solves the problem of … The problem is therefore how to extract the ‘design’ genes so we can manipulate it.

Design Gene Extraction.

need to extract the genes
need a method to do this.
pre genetic sequencing biologists used to infer genetics from measuring the ‘phenotypic characteristics’ of organisms.
Morphogenetic Prototyping allows us to do the same in design.

An exciting discovery of morphogenetic Prototyping McGinley et. al, 2016 was that the idea that

$Phenotype=Genotype+Environment$

could be rearranged to:

$Genotype=Phenotype-Environment$

Genes

In biology genes have been described as ‘expressing’ at specific developmental stages. This means that instead of an explicit spatial plan, construction diagram or system. (Design)Genes are defined here as They are defined in code

The role of the architect in this scenario could be to both ‘write’ the designGenes and adopt Kai’s role as the ‘carver’ that triggers them to define the spatial programme, experience and materiality of the building organism.

McGinley et. al, 2016

Agile Prototyping Gene Spaces

This will include all the genes from last year…

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These developed into the metadisciplinary eleements shown here.

So what are the genes of architectural engineering?

Previously we have left it open to you to define the focus and problem of your agile prototypes. This helped you to define your project later at thesis, however we learnt from the course feedback, that it would be helpful to reduce the options a bit :) Therefore we analysed the project choices from last year and checked based on your feedback in the recent google form. We will therefore offer nine focus areas this semester, which you can see below. There are still a lot of areas and some will be better supported than others, but we hope this reflects your diverse interests. It is also very appropriate to consider a ‘major’ and ‘minor’ in your projects. The feedback from the industry is that they want graduates that have a deep specialisation ‘a major’ that they can integrate with another aspect ‘a minor’. An example would be the ability to perform both advanced structural and LCA analysis in a project.

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