Bioptemes and Mechy Max Systems: Topological Imaginations of Adaptive Architecture

Abstract

The notion of “adaptiveness” is theoretically and technically entangled with the concept of “fit.” That is, theories and practices of adaptive architecture variously propose processes through which a physical structure with embedded computing capabilities transforms to “fit” a changing context. Aiming to activate the notion of “fit” as a multivalent and contested concept and to illuminate its ties to the techniques enlisted to fulfill it, this paper examines three germinal experiments from early research on architecture and computation. It focuses on the divergent ways that these experiments defined the system boundaries between “structure” and “context” and on the contingency of these boundaries on specific mathematical and calculative techniques. The paper begins with efforts to match patterns of spatial organization with patterns of human activity through graphs and electrical network analogies, which I argue generated an imagination of architectural form as agile and transformable by external organizational structures. From these attempts to calculate “good fit,” the paper moves to the notion of “misfit” as a guiding principle for systematic design processes that professed to preserve architecture and its context as an indivisible “ensemble.” I focus on the mathematical representations of this “ensemble” and their implications for conceptualizing time and dynamic phenomena. Finally, the paper discusses attempts to theorize and implement an “evolutionary fit” as the result of a “conversation” between human agents and an “intelligent” surround that is capable of movement and active transformation. The paper frames these experiments as episodes in architects’ engagement with a topological imagination of design, in which invariant mathematical scaffolds become not only enablers, but also inhibitors, of an open-ended and nimble conception of architectural environments.