Formal Process Flow? Reseach is by definition a chaotic territory. Can it be amenable to a narrative?

If you think so, you can follow a provided argumentation, and at the end you will have learned its main points. But texts may be like stars linked in large constellations: if you believe that this article doesn't need to have a single goal, you could jump between paragraphs and imagine a plurality of architectural outcomes, based on your preferences for choices outlined below. Medium? This research is organized retrospectively in relation to a new medium I have been exploring. But what is, in any case, a medium of architecture? A few black and white photographs mediated North American industrial buildings to European modernists who never saw them in person. Upon my first visit to New York ten years ago, I spent the first week learning concepts about it from a book, afraid not to afford the city's exploration. This research, started five years ago, will be made accessible through the medium of formal process. Space Only? If you defend a position of autonomy for architecture, you may consider space as its most important and (in the case of internal space) even exclusive medium: its axiom. Related concepts may deal with the overlapping of volumes, interiority/exteriority, or frontality. A gradual layering of different spatial systems may introduce an unpredictable complexity of spatial configurations and emulate in a single fragment the density of intentions present in an old city. In Peter Eisenman's Pompeii Train Station, for instance, different systems of organization generated by an extension of the surrounding urban fabrics clash and imbricate, so that these original systems intentionally can't be traced from the final project anymore. The process of a gradual layering, related in its outcome to a densely evolved urban area, questions the spatial axiom: to what extent is time involved? Formal Process Computing is obsessed with the duration of its processes. Architecture is becoming obsessed with computing. Will architecture become obsessed with duration? In case you consider the boundary of architecture permeable to other disciplines, you could envisage its adoption of process-based reasoning. In that case, what could be the influence of formal process upon the core of the discipline space? There is, for example, a clear difference between computer game space and the space it simulates: procedural landscapes replace static models, behavior-based agents supersede typified users etc. Architecture could embody such formal instability, design of choices, and definition of responses. The use of coded, formal processes promises a dynamic, responsive architecture. Standard? Do you expect a space to be unique? It can evolve from undifferentiated to highly specific through mutation and selection acting on a predefined system: a process defined by project constraints will lead space from one generation to a better one. To illustrate: I started to remodel the UFO Bridge landing in Bratislava with simple planes of program: park, shops, traffic. By subsequently shredding and shifting them, I outlined a

system that mixed the programmatic needs step by step, until the building balanced the influence of the original programs. (Fig. 1) Causal Net A mutable system for a unique building as outlined above can also extend into a malleable standard. Unlike the standards of modernism, such a dynamic standard is based on a parametric inscription. Rather than a conceptual hierarchy dependent on a central idea, such an inscription is a precisely designed network of causal relationships between a multitude of architectural attributes. Changes in some attributes propagate through the whole conceptual cloud to generate various specific spaces based on a generic engine. The Hyperstyle Space, on which I worked in Princeton, defined a spatial quality first: a grid of structural elements varying continuously from columns through hollow cores, individual spaces to merged clusters. These elements were then linked to the program and site to create a whole urban quarter over the Hudson Rail Yards. (Fig. 2) Multiplicity Loop If you reread the previous paragraph and substitute a different architecture another conceptual cloud into the nodes of the causal network described, you will get a recursion in consecutive scales that might lead to interesting outcomes as, for example, an urban strategy. I'm currently exploring a related approach: like a swarm of birds that can be simulated by simple rules follow the speed of neighbors, avoid collisions, steer towards the center of the flock my swarm of nodes/buildings can lead to an urban cohesion of heights or other parameters. Unlike current zoning that statically predefines a condition on a site, this dynamic Swarm Zoning would infer the next allowed move from the configuration of the surroundings at each step constantly current rather than trailing the development by years. (Fig. 3) Times The inclusion of formal process into investigations about future spaces on the level of other tools/media such as photography, rendering, drawing, or modeling, makes space further dependent on time. Not only upon the time of movement leading to architectural promenades or cinematic sections, but also upon the time of design: development time, evolutionary time, realtime. Peter Stec