RC8 Mereologies: Wa(o)nderYards
Research Cluster 8 - Large City Architecture
B-Pro Architecture Design, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCl London
led by Daniel Koehler
2016-2017
Team Wa(o)nderyards: Chen Chen, Genmao Li, Zixuan Wang
Wa(o)nderYards sampled courtyards as the classical void-room of a house. Focusing on occupational restrictions their research shows how shifts of combinatorial granularity enable diversity through the repetition of simple room samples.
RESEARCH CLUSTER 8 - Large City Architecture: Our research intends, here by and with architecture, to investigate the effects and potential of digital practices at urban scale. The notion of to be urban, or in other words of being situated in a city becomes rather interesting with the digital forms of cities designed by pure quantities: data. Strangely, today's abundant information inverses the foresight of an immaterialist city. The completed anthropomorphic scenography of our environments reverses as you look to its main driving ingredient. Data becomes the missing link between the human and inhuman parts of the city as it makes things talk by pointing to its origin and author: the technical being. Here the role of architecture becomes crucial, as digital cities are always localized in their quantities, their parts, and their architecture. As plot, as compartment wall, as courtyard, as window: with digital representations the city is measured, regulated and molded into explicit parts of architecture. The encapsulation of “city” into architectural parts turns common part-to-whole conditions upside down. With digital models, the city is articulated through physical parts of a building for the building addressing the city. This phenomenon opens the possibility again to articulate the city with architecture.
Mereologies Here we propose the term mereology, in contrast to the notion of typology as a methodological framework to design an architectural object, not by reference to content or form, but by the resonance of its parts. Mereologies describe the condition of a building as a city from architectural parts. The three research projects outlined here, consider such compositional qualities on different scales, such as house of walls, house of rooms, and house of houses.
Many thanks to our consultants, guests and critics: Consultant: Rasa Navasaityte; Computational consultant: Christoph Zimmel; Thanks to our critics: Alisa Andrasek, Roberto Botazzi, Prof Mario Carpo, Tommaso Casucci, Prof Stephen Gage, Prof Frédéric Migayrou, Maj Plemintas, Andrew Porter, Jose Sanchez, Casey Rehm