The Charles Moore Learning Center

The Charles Moore Learning Center is my competition entry of 2020 for a public library and learning center in Austin. The building is configured as an artificial network that translates part relationships between program and structure into spatial sequences: the configuration shown here, the facade included, was set entirely between part and whole by a trained recursive assembler.

The layout was generated in a combinatorial assembly simulation. Its point of departure is a reading of OMA’s Jussieu Library of 1992, Rem Koolhaas’s proposal to fold the floors of a library into one continuous surface; here the continuity is not folded but aggregated. An assembler trained by reinforcement learning, with Unity ML-Agents, learned to stack ensembles of parts under two conditions: the aggregation had to remain continuous, and it must not become linear, so that the stacks form a network of paths rather than a single route. The snapshot from the generation shows the assembler at work. The resulting building layout was generated entirely this way; the renderings only clothe it.

The two renderings show what such an assembler produces when the whole is decided from its parts. A glazed ground floor opens the reading rooms to the street and to a plaza of low benches. Above it the floors are stacked as trays and shelves of pale timber that step in and out of one another, so that the facade is not a skin applied to a volume but the outer edge of the assembly itself: each projection is a room, a terrace or a shelf, and the profile of the building changes from level to level. At the corner the lowest trays reach the height of the street trees.

The entry belongs to the fully simulated building assemblies I made in Austin between 2020 and 2022, alongside the studios of those years: When Stairs are not only Stairs, Stairs and Slabs, Stairs and Structure, One Part Table and ThreeNine. In each of them assemblers position parts against parts, and program and structure are translated into one another at every step rather than drawn first and structured afterwards. Unity Technologies supported this Architecture Cloud Simulation Research with consultancy and cloud computing from 2020 to 2022.