Laka Competition: Architecture that Reacts ’17

noMad – a self-assembling fabrication system utilizing machinic behaviour & real-time decision making to enable architecture with a sensory system.

Even though the city itself becomes a dynamic entity in our information accelerated society, the paradigm of today’s construction cycles and methods leave only restrained opportunities for dynamic responses in our urban fabric. The rapid transfer of knowledge in an information society demands a new and innovative translation to our building methods as well as towards our perception of built environment. Architecture must be ready to adapt towards autonomous mobility and an on-demand society.

noMad proposes a behavioral fabrication system that marks a shift from built environment as a finite lifecycle construct to autonomous, non-finite and real-time solutions to adapt dynamically to the demands of its environment. Therefore the project aims at social-architectural issues of integrating automated, self-sustaining behavioral and fully mobile systems into people’s daily life. The system acts at the interface between architecture, (autonomous) mobility and the citizens of a city.

Today’s autonomous systems are largely used in logistics and fabrication of industrial goods in fully automated production cycles. We see a chance for the building industry to adopt small scale, versatile and autonomous robotic systems to translate a static construct into a dynamic environment that reacts in real-time to the needs of the social-urban fabric, creating ever transformable architectures, infrastructures and adaptive spaces. Through processing urban big data, using machine learning algorithms, the proposed noMad architectural system becomes the ability to communicate towards each other, a city’s needs and the end user.

noMad’s goal is to create an architecture for a “Prosumer” (a future trend where the consumer becomes the producer i.e. via new and readily available fabrication methods) society, where the user becomes designer of its own architectural space, counter acting the super-imposed top-down approaches of today’s architecture offices. The architect, in that manner steps back to create an open system that is non-finite and ever expanding itself through feedback loops. The goal is to bring the architecture closer to the end user on-demand in a system that is based on peer-to-peer communication.

In a self-assembling fabrication approach of ‚negotiated space‘, noMad aims to enable architecture with a sensory system, localizing decision making by self-aware unit to unit communication instead of a deterministic, superimposed building plan.

Anchored in the world of self-structuring polyhedra, noMad is based on principles of synergetics, the study of geometry in transformation and the impact of a local change on its global systems behaviour: a single unit can autonomously change shape, shifting its state by a simple rotational translation from one polyhedra to the other.

Hereby, noMad is operating on distinct scales of (collective) intelligence and autonomy, each autonomously self-assembling to the next higher order of organisation – from a highly mobile, nomadic state to high population spatial configurations.

noMad proposes a system that can self-regulate and adapt, react to outside influences and demands and encourages both interaction and communication.