There are no homogenous material assemblies in nature. Wood is such an intricate natural material rich in inherent features starting on the microscopic level. It is essential to analyse and understand the material's capabilities in all the scales to uncover brand new material behaviours and design possibilities. We enter an age of digital fabrication with compound wood materials allowing for reliable properties and milling technology enabling complete manipulation of solid wood.
The geographical position and abundance of forests determined the spread of wood as the primary building material until the 20th century. Therefore, the region of Bukovina holds a rich collection of woodenware and reminiscences of wooden architecture with outstanding ornamentation. Due to industrialization and standardized building products, material's innate characteristics and inherent heterogeneity remain primarily neglected and unexplored.
Assembly lines caused a world made of parts, framing the imagination to think about the objects as assemblies of discrete elements with distinct functions. But there are no homogenous material assemblies in nature. We enter an age of digital fabrication, with compound wood materials allowing for reliable properties and milling technology enabling complete manipulation of solid wood.
The project's design is based on the complex wood anatomy and material investigation, combining various scales and parts of wood, which enabled the discovery of new unseen forms out of wood. The project aims to rediscover the local folklore of wooden architecture and introduce design parameters proposing ethnographic environments that speak genuinely of its birthplace and the future.
Today, our task is not to resist the global, but to seek the most creative ways to develop the richer regions. Therefore, not a mixture that erases difference, but instead a compound that enables creating a new kind of difference. By acknowledging geography, climate and landscape, we can create a vision that speaks truly of its birthplace and the future of Bucovina.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Forms are nature-based but artificial. Wooden vessel skin is heterogeneous alike in nature, dividing surface to the differentiated fabrication and wood types. Vessel wall details are entirely dependent on the exact relationship with the whole structure of the landscape. Even though the material will be fabricated digitally, it is still a naturally grown biological tissue, which inhabits life forms replicating within it. Some parts of the material, not depending on the type of preservation, are constantly in the process of decay. The project represents the system of an organism with various scales of ingredients.
The project proposes a prototype-based structure combining various scales and parts of the spatial program and functions as an artificial self-organising organism. The system is composed of vessel units merging into fluid spaces. The process of spaces follows the types and characteristics of the organism being referenced.
Recently architecture has experienced an extraordinary increase of technological possibilities for advancing architectural design. Nevertheless, the impact of technology has left some significant aspects of the design largely unchallenged. Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and algorithmic Computational Design essentially employ the computer's capacity to broaden the knowledge and instrumentalize wood's complex behaviour. Universal regionalism means a global culture in which material logics create regions rather than the other way around. Tourism today is integrated with cultural forces as well.
The project attempts not to distinguish between natural and artificial but to perceive qualities of the unified structure. It is articulated as a flowing landscape with the scattered elements having no defined boundaries operating between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
The prefix "proto-" does not only refer here to the futuristic dimension. This is only one of its meanings, undoubtedly a significant one. Everything is beyond the world (das Gaby Andere, radical otherness). Still, it breaks with semantics and syntax, such as biological linguistics and is part of the conception of advanced geometries that give coherence to complicated structures. Design methods are defined by the proto-cellular coherence of a cybernetic and performative architectural object.
Project's landscape is designed by translating the original 1 :1 wood piece to another scale, which allowed to see the intricacy of the material from the different perspective. Scattered architectonic spaces similar to 4 season pavilions, recreational paths and open-air activities are fully integrated within the landscape.
The protoarchitectonic wood-based structure is designed as a combination of various scales and parts of wood that functions as an artificial forest. Structure is composed out of vessel units merging together into fluid spaces. Function of spaces follow the types and characteristics of wood being used. This so-called proto-organs represents a vertical wood cell, where the spaces are created by cell walls dividing the unit. Each vessel represents a combination of various scales and parts. Circulation infrastructure is connecting vessels continuously throughout the entire site.
Diverse organic spaces of the vessels have no define borders between the interior and exterior, providing the spatial transparency in a very intricate organism. Interrelating horizontal and vertical elements are providing the new spatial experience.The Protoarchitectonic-based structure is designed as a combination of various scales and parts of the spatial program and functions as an artificial self-organising organism. Structure is composed out of vessel units merging together into fluid spaces. Function of spaces follow the types and characteristics of the organism being referenced.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Communication in architecture means connection with and through architecture. Spatial-architectural communication is neither a preliminary nor a contribution to other biological communication processes but part of them. It chooses the space for dialogue and communicates this choice via the form.
The experiment will translate the original bio-morphological process into another scale, allowing us to see the intricacy of the material from a different perspective. Scattered architectonic spaces will get integrated within the landscape.
Regarding the interdisciplinary and professional collaboration with local communities, inclusion and empowerment are two strategies for rediscovering the architectural folklore that should be presented to integrate citizens' design ideas and wishes in the urban planning, architecture character and management process. Additionally, this methodology is a unity of local knowledge and observation. The approach combines crowdsourcing citizens' opinions and thoughts with active design tools through modern information and communication technology (ICT). The dynamic design feedback from a city's inhabitants will identify missing and essential elements in the path towards responsive architecture and, further, a responsive city.
The delivery of the digital timber project demonstrator throughout this framework and the publication of the guidance document outlining a future digital fabrication-aware language will place the revival of Bukovina's folklore at the forefront of the oncoming digital revolution in the construction industry. It will help modernize an industry critical to the sustainable functioning of society as a whole, inclusive of societal, economic and environmental factors.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
Our world is changing faster than ever. Our communities need cultural experiences that speak to our new reality. The project will be a spatial scenography tool for participatory performances, realised using-proto architecture, an incubator environment for new experiences and expression in the arts and culture genre leveraging new sustainable and responsive technologies.
The design will create an interactive, self-adaptive space affected by users' movement, position, and touch. The prototype is a pilot platform, a mobile laboratory for exploring how new fabrication technologies will tell powerful, memorable stories in new ways to new audiences. This new awareness of the sensitivity and instrumentality provides a dynamic and playful environment for scenic areas within public spaces and encourages the development of adaptable architecture structures that respond to its environment.
The prototype platform will explore the tensions between intimacy and sense of scale and the relationship between artists, audiences and immersion in adaptable space delivered through vernacular and technology. It challenges conventional design methodologies and the significance of manipulating the space to shape perception to create a framework for exploring public-private interrelation. In contrast to other scales in which automated kinetic functions are well established, the field of adaptive and interactive prototypes applied to folklore is novel, with relatively few precedents. New technologies and new design working methods are needed for this emerging field. Development of folkloric, architectural scales of responsive, adaptive and self-organising functions can effectively draw from multiple disciplines, including professional architecture, traditional arts and craft techniques, biology, systems design engineering and computer engineering.
Today, commitments to sustainability or minimization of the damage prove insufficient. To develop regenerative capabilities, architecture needs to extend beyond the form
and function of things in contained projects and engage with the management of complex systems. Such systems involve multiple dynamic phenomena – biotic/abiotic,
technical/cultural – and can be understood as living. In top-down architectures, systems within the built form are isolated from one another and the immediate surroundings and
possess only one flow of energy from the natural environment to the built form. Proto-folklore creates an alternative platform, which marries humanism and environmentalism.
What is the link, if any, between the material and emotional realms? This project relates to the classical philosophy of ‘hylozoism’, the ancient belief that all matter has life. Implicit in this way of seeing the world is an oscillation, which might be said a certain ambiguity, between the parts and the whole.
Out of this oscillation emerges a spirit that is not wholly transcendent of its material origins yet somehow distinct. In contrast to traditional definitions of architecture based on
inert, rigid structures, these immersive and interactive spaces explore the implications of constructing dynamic, flexible, highly interactive spaces. Synthetic metabolic material design challenges human ingenuity to understand and apply synthetic cellular life forms to architecture. Protoarchitecture involves biological processes found in Nature to create material computing units through the programming of artificial cellular life to create environmental antidotes.
The deployment of the Prototype can be thought of in stages, which allows for strategic phasing of investment.
Stage 1 – Prototyping: The focus will be to provide creatives with the technological environment to experiment with the technology and allow artists an initial extended development period to produce content shared with local communities. Work would focus on the commissioning and early development of one original short performance.
Stage 2 – National (Romania) demonstrator: this stage would involve developing the complete Prototype. Once constructed, the Prototype would be deployed in public to engage with new audiences, presenting content development in Stage 1. Ongoing experimentation and creative collaborations would occur in situ, continuing its primary mission of facilitating the exploration of how new responsive architecture and adaptive technologies can be used.
Stage 3 – International demonstrator: In this stage, the Prototype would be deployed in different locations, exploring residencies and collaborations with other creative entities to examine further how audiences and creatives respond to their new technologies.
Publication contents will include a detailed description of the study and prototype design and quantification of whole-life hybrid appraisals and the formulation of shape and structure control methods, experimentation development of protodesign methodologies and strategies, enacted through a combination of discrete analysis medium computation. Periodic progress reports would be featured in academic publications (journal, conference) and full-scale demonstration projects offsite installations facilities. The spaces are to be determined but include such target venues as Theatres of community public, unconventional spaces.
I plan to give small-scale presentations via online platforms to reach out to a broader audience. I am looking forward to implementing a crowdsourcing platform to support co-creating tools with various active community members across Romania. My further ambitions are to promote more interest around this project, generate public interest, and find partners to establish more community-based engagement through prototyped structures and performances, already starting to hack national public spaces with these interventions.
@Felciuc, 2022
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