Creative autoregulation Towards an interactive urban landscape

Gaetano De Francesco Faculty of Architecture - Sapienza University of Rome

Architectural Theories and Project Department Rome, Italy

gaetano.defrancesco@uniroma1.it

Rosetta Angelini Faculty of Architecture - Sapienza University of Rome

Architectural Theories and Project Department Rome, Italy

rosetta.angelini@uniroma1.it

Abstract—Architecture aims to create smart environments that, based on the network model, resemble more and more to living systems. New relations generate interactive landscapes where man finds new individual and collective dimensions.

Keywords-information technology; architecture; interactivity; relations; metaphor; participation; emotion

I. INTRODUCTION Atoms are increasingly interconnected through packets

of energy, called quanta. From micro to macro all living and not living systems are related to the external environment. The membranes for the cells, the body for the man and the atmosphere [1] for the ground represent the means of the interaction.

In the living systems the exchanges with the exterior are made in a selective way because they are cognitive systems [2] that auto regulate themselves internally in a circular way, able to learn and evolve by dissipating the minimum energy.

The science of ecology is based on physical and mathematical theories [3] of approximation and uncertainty where, at every level, all living systems are networks in other networks structured on an organized complexity. Cooperation between living organisms and different species [4] determines the evolution and growth of the system. Modern science has replaced the hierarchical pyramidal model, whose apex was the man, with the rhizomic model in which the parties are in a living and unpredictable dynamic equilibrium. The probabilistic model has replaced the deterministic one in which the primary goal is the pursuit of optimum condition.

"But if everything is connected, how is possible to

understand complexity? Which operational tools can replicate the network model in our "constructions"? "

Information technology provides "mathematical

models" to explore the chemical and physical world and the biological complexity of nature, able to structure new relationships. The dynamic equilibrium concepts, the concept of organized complexity and optimization find their expression through generative algorithms that implement mechanisms conceptually similar to those of the biochemical processes discovered by genetic science. Genetic algorithms [5], at the base of the models, allow the evaluation of starting solutions that, recombined and changed through the introduction of apparent disorder

elements, are able to create new ones to converge towards optimal solutions. They produce behaviours that not always are predictable because they don't appear to be deductible only by the sum of the parts that constitute the starting point of the process.

Therefore some anomalous and out of necessity [6] behaviour, unexpectedly occurred, impossible to predict that can enable a creative leap.

II. CRISIS The information that today penetrates in our database

can create the algorithms of our projects, leading to new possibilities for topological mutation and adaptation, besides the ability of management, transformation and future building development, local system structuring, fabrication and construction organization. But primarily it can generate opened relations, interactive dynamics to create an information space.

The city space and the contemporary architecture space is not the Euclidian one, is not the classical physic space. It is a space whose bricks, whose raw material is information [7]. There is no more an immobile space and there aren’t objects in him, but a set of relations to be activated that must enter into the architectural project in all its aspects. Objects can acquire intelligence and information and interact with others and the space is not a vacuum where you place objects but an activatable, modifiable and reagent network through the electronic.

“Can man activate this network and determine changes in the city? How can the man create dynamic interconnections and interact with the contemporary city? Are these interconnections able to learn and evolve into a systemic space constantly changing and how?”

The research project reflects on a new model of the wired city in which man, among the main components of the model, is able to determine mutations within the smart city. The city becomes a sensitive and responsive environment to the people presence.

III. STRATEGIES It is possible to think at the contemporary city as a

living system in continuous transformation, able to mutate and activate cycles in rapport to the human presence and not only. Man may be the agent of the change within the consolidated city. The inhabitant can became the enzyme, the catalyst for new and unpredictable relational processes and poetic landscapes, interacting with the environment.

2014 International Conference on Intelligent Environments

978-1-4799-2947-4 2014

U.S. Government Work Not Protected by U.S. Copyright

DOI 10.1109/IE.2014.61

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The Web represents the first mean by which people can become active participants in the processes of planning and decision-making. Internet, social networks, special apps facilitate the participation processes in the field of architectural and urban design and of regeneration of critic zones of the city. The processes became bottom up and the community, more informed, acquires a greater force. But this is only a very first level through which it created interaction between different actors involved in the architectural and urban design.

The explosive growth of computer devices makes it possible to send and receive information to and from the city that, according to the needs and desires of the people, but also to other parameters such as environmental ones, it becomes an informed and informing system.

A profound change has affected the architecture. From the typologies we moved to the diagrams, from designs to the models able to process large amounts of information. Through the algorithmic design it is possible to create new connections in order to build an interactive aesthetic of the contemporary city.

Finally, the development of micro-technology and engineering makes physically possible the transformation of the city, or parts of it, in real time, generating ever-changing landscapes in which alternate multiple narratives and meanings.

Streets, squares and building facades, generally static

places, become dynamic spaces, places of aesthetic events, always different, where material and immaterial information are intertwined and where the same user participates as a co-activator sending multiple information to personalize spaces and places of interest or just to play with them.

Architectures become Plug-IT landscapes in which the substrates assets play a fundamental role.

TreeIT, an interactive environment to rehabilitate Lake

Vico, represents a first materialization of this research.

Figure 1. TreeIT, nITro Saggio, Delta Studio and Fub Hub, Ronciglione (IT) 2013

Based on the above considerations, the nITro Saggio

group, of which the writers are members, is the author of this project that operates the transformation of the square into a space that lends itself to many fruition and that responds to the solicitations of bodies that pass through it.

A walkway exhorts the visitor to cross the interactive forest consisting of more than one hundred synthetic trees, which reveal that only the active presence of the community may activate processes.

“"The trees light up only with the passage of people.

They are silent, without the public will, but come on when this will is present.” (Antonino Saggio 2014)

The position of the body is detected by three ultrasonic

proximity sensor connected via Arduino to the LED lighting system places on top of the artificial trees. The project, totally self-made, also reveals how through simple technologies, available to everyone, designer can imagine and realize without great difficulty changing landscapes with a strong poetic vocation.

Figure 2. TreeIT, nITro Saggio, Delta Studio and Fub Hub, Ronciglione (IT) 2013

TreeIT wants to develop a public social space that

attempts to merge the solidity of the built with the fluidity of relations and with the immateriality of the net using ludic experience and wonder as means of awareness and appropriation of context of which people enjoy.

In that extreme facility (easiness) of children play, continuously producing "strange and bizarre lands", there is the fundamental driving force of a new urban culture evolution understood as space of freedom in which(where) to change our point of view on reality that surrounds us, too often given as unchangeable.

[8]. “Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time

and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.

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It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of

modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action.” [9].

Space becomes an event in which man is the absolute

protagonist able to live and to activate continuous narrations.

Projective, procedural and physical interactivity alternate more and more in the architectural projects attempting (essaying) to express a contemporary aesthetic. The real innovation is not so much the new formal language but contents and meanings that they convey.

We can talk about narrative ecosystems! Metaphor has a fundamental role in the world of

information, it is the language of contemporary architecture.

Our dreams are expressed through metaphorical images, they are the ones closest to our unconscious and emotions.

Even our senses “use” the metaphor. They are sweating out our emotions and through mirror neurons [10] we identify with an evoked reality, even stronger because abstract and therefore emotionally more immediate.

In TreeIT everyone is free to dream-wish whatever he

wants, everyone can imagine a forest of trees, feel immersed in an underwater backdrop, in a starry sky, in a field of sunflowers or the gorse smell lit by fireflies.

In the evoked spaces function is not declared but suggested so user can activate the imagination and interact in a creative ways. That creative act represents the action able to determine that sense of belonging transforms a simple user in an inhabitant because integral part of the narration.

In TreeIT, space is evoked, there are no declared seats. It is in that lack of definition, in that vagueness that the ramp, by varying its thickness and its inclination, takes on more functions simultaneously, multiple scenarios, becoming sitting area, surface to lie, skate track, catwalk for a fashion show.

In this imaginative freedom lies its catalyst strength.

IV. CONCLUSIONS Information technology makes it possible to reproduce

the organized complexity of different and mutants relations, made by the parameters and environmental phenomena, by the choices and assumptions, perceptions-emotions with which the man reconnects to the great net of life [11], essential to search that unpredictability that through a systemic approach transforms the space into an urban landscape of sustainable beauty.

The technology implementations allow interactions able to activate more senses thus increasing our creative

and narrative ability. Everyone can invent own story, always different from other ones because everyone chooses his metaphor [12].

In the creative act there is the self recognition and then the link with the place.

The contemporary city is the city of the evoked scenarios where the inclusion of sensorial interaction levels, obtained not only by advanced computer technologies but also by recent nanotechnology and biotechnology studies, will play an increasingly systemic role.

The famous aphorism “Form follows function” is replaced by the new one “Form follows Behavior”.

Figure 3. TreeIT, nITro Saggio, Delta Studio and Fub Hub, Ronciglione (IT) 2013

Screens showing the citizens mood, piezoelectric

surfaces interacting with children movement, maybe creating energy, asphalts that react to the artificial light, changing color to inform and redesign our streets and

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public spaces, are just some examples of new possibilities that designers of the contemporary city must consider. The contemporary city has become "what if", it must be transformed into a narrative space where freedom of imagination of everyone recreates the close and deep connection with the essence of life, the creative act.

“For the grown-up, who suffers under this creative

impotence, which was forced onto him, the only possibility left is to return to his own childhood and to start again from the last moment, where he was dragged out of his dreams.

But these dreams were not just longings, but his real basis, without which he can never grow into a human being” [13].

V. PROJECT CREDITS TreeIt is a nITro Saggio group project in collaboration

with The FabHub and deltastudio. Following the Design Team: Partners in charge: Valerio Galeone, Dario Pompei. Designers: Luca Bregni, Gaetano De Francesco,

Giuseppe D’Emilio, Antonio De Pasquale, Rosamaria Faralli, Valerio Galeone, Davide Motta, Dario Pompei.

Interactive Designer: Valerio Galeone. Team: Rosetta Angelini, Luca Bregni, Gaetano De

Francesco, Giuseppe D’Emilio, Antonio De Pasquale, Rosamaria Faralli , Denise Franzè, Valerio Galeone,

Saverio Massaro, Davide Motta, Dario Pompei, Antonino Saggio, Angelica Sansonetti, Liborio Sforza.

Collaborators: The FabHub, deltastudio Photographs: Rosamaria Faralli (FaRo Image).

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