NATURAL SYSTEMS STUDIO

2012 Semester 2 F

ERNANDO G

HELFI

0/INDEX

1/SCALE

2/DNA

3/PERSPECTIVE

4/DRAWING

5/CELLS

6/STACKING

GHELFI + G

RUSZEWSKI

SCALE

Population density, Paris, 2008, IAURIF Brain CT scan, cedars-sinai hospital

SCALE

Satelite image of delta, NASA Cabbage leaf, Flikr.com

SCALE

“The mind cannot visualize the whole infinite self-em-bedding of complexity. But to someone with a geometer’s way of thinking about form, this kind of repetition of structure on finer and finer scales can open a whole world. Exploring these shapes, pressing one’s mental fingers into the rubbery edges of their possibilities, was a kind of playing, and [Benoit] Mandelbrot took a childlike delight in seeing variations that no one had seen or understood before. […]”(James Gleick, Chaos - Making a new science, 1988) page 100

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make theirappearance in the world.

Aristotle

MARSHA COTTRELL

SCALE

GALAXY, HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE

Man-made constellations, composed on Illustrator using punctuation markes as building blocks.Galaxies of semi-colons, clusters of questions and exclamations make up this artificial sky.

Satelite image of Kamchatka, NASA Painting, Bianca-Lua Ayrosa, Middle, 2008

SCALE

Cloud formations Fractal generation , Ultra Fractal 5.0

SCALE

Fractal morphologies can be understood regardless of scale is this why we can see similar organisational

logics in clouds and in smoke?

“The mind cannot visualize the whole infinite self-embedding of complexity. But to someone with a geometer’s way of thinking about form, this kind of repetition of structure on finer and finer scales can

open a whole world. Exploring these shapes, pressing one’s mental fingers into the rubbery edges of their possibilities, was a kind of playing, and [Benoit]

Mandelbrot took a childlike delight in seeing variations that no one had seen or understood before.”

James Gleick, Chaos - Making a new science, 1988 page 100

Slime Mold experiment, Tokyo rail system

Urban future organization/ blog

“Nature isn’t so poor that she needs constant improvement”

Albert Renger-Patzsch

Tokyo: night-time satelite image, NASA

SCALE

REFERENCE

GALAXY, HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE

Douglas Rushkoff argues that our tools are set up with a certain bias, programmed with an agenda completely independant from our in-

tended use of them.

DNA

DNA and City Can one define or ultimately plan a suburb? Or even a whole city? There are so many elements at play, that if, architects, urban planners and landscape architects were to study all aspects of a city design and compile all the relevant data – cultural, histori-cal, ecological, topographic, atmospheric, etc – a design would take decades to start taking shape into the tracing paper. By then, dozens of other elements have come into play and the data collected in the past would have been outdated.Cities are living organisms. They expand in size, grow in popula-tion, and acquire new cultural heritages without any predictable control. However, there is an underlying behavioural pattern within each of the City’s elements that can be traced back from its origin, or at least identified of its function. “The pattern of energy flow through living forms, and through all the forms of human culture, the networks of cities and states, is subject to many fluctuations and perturbations. The flow is modified by ‘feedbacks’, but occasionally there is such an amplification or inhibition that the system must change, must reorganize or col-lapse.”1The DNA code for any living form can today be written with dem-onstration of its structure and elements; similarly to our cit-ies, it can also pose a striking complex task if one was to fully manipulate all its functions and behaviours. Although with much simpler array of elements, the DNA can arrange itself in thousands of different combinations resulting in a multitude of systems – a scale of a fish, the human skin, and a snake’s eye. “The consequence of multiple interactions at many different lev-els of hierarchy that coevolves across many spatial scales is that the higher level system is organized from within.” 2Following the same parallel, cities and living forms depend on a fundamental element for their own existence: energy. It can be harvested from nature from various sources: solar, wind, water, etc. For their survival, cities rely largely on a combination of available ecological resources. In their absence, cities collapse into extinction, forcing its inhabitants to migrate to areas where nature can still provide means of minimal survival. 3 Con-versely, living forms thrive in environments in which are suit-able for their liveability; abundance in food, appropriate air /water temperature, capability for stable reproduction. When the surrounding natural environment becomes too severe, species are required to change their behaviour within the same or following generations (genetic code alteration causing mutation)

[…] the whole organization is so tied together during its growth and development, that when slight variations in any one part oc-cur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. […] Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents and a cause for each must exist it is the steady accumulation, through natu-ral selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the indi-vidual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of this earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive. […]4To engage with the city, architects and urban designers must then embrace other disciplinary aspects in addition to the built environment; the understanding of the complexity of human condi-tion and ecological systems - and their constant evolution - be-come a central role to the design process which in turn can be effectively sympathetic in form and function – rather than pure-ly aesthetically driven - to the ‘megasystem’ called city.“City forms are material constructs that are composed of a spa-tial array of dwellings, a pattern of streets and public spaces together with differentiated buildings of varying sizes associ-ated with a regulation of energy and material flow; and the ex-tension of a metabolic network across the surrounding territory. City forms emerged within different topographies and ecological systems, evolving from regional variations of the founding sys-tem and the established patterns of settlements from which they condensed. The forms expanded and developed, strongly coupled to the dynamic changes of climate and ecology within which they were situated.”5 The parallel between the DNA code and the ur-ban fabric of a city lies on the similarities of their complex-ity. Both are heavily structured and dependant on a network of interactions within the very elements that they are made of. For the DNA, the nucleobases A-G-T-C are arranged in a multi-tude of base-stacking interactions which structures the double-helix whereas in a city, socio-cultural-political and environ-mental relationships are at play. The hierarchical intricacies and complexity between those interactions define the forms, func-tions and behaviours of a much larger system: a living being or a city.

GHELFI

1. Weinstock , The Architecture of Emergence, (West Sussex, John Wiley & Sons, 2010), p292.Weinstock , Emergence, p303.Weinstock , Emergence, p1864.Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species,(UK, John Murray, 1859), Chapter 5 Laws of Variation5.Weinstock , Emergence, p202

DNA

Mitosis, digitally enhanced microscopic view, UNSW DNA sequencing (stock)

DNA

Barcode 3 Code

//----------declareimport toxi.geom.*;

//ArrayList walkerCollection;Bar myBar;Walker1 walk1;Walker2 walk2;ArrayList lineWalker;Paralel par;

int dim = 5;float mX, mY, dist;float downX, downY, dragDist;float speed = 50F;int num = 1000;avoid[] things;

//---------initializevoid setup() { size(800, 400); smooth(); background(0);

lineWalker = new ArrayList();

walk1 = new Walker1(); walk2 = new Walker2();

Vec3D startLoc = new Vec3D (width/4, height/4, 0); par = new Paralel(startLoc); // ----cluster white things = new avoid[num]; for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) { things[i] = new avoid(random(width), random(height), random(width), random(height)); }}

//--------drawvoid draw() {

//background(0); fill(0, 25); rectMode (CENTER); rect(400, 200, width, height); //-------run Paralels par.run(); // ---------bar actions myBar = new Bar(random(0, 800), height-300); myBar.run(); //------------walker actions walk1.display(); walk1.step(); walk1.rerun(); walk2.display(); walk2.step(); walk2.rerun();

// line walkerWalker3 w3 = new Walker3(random(0,800), random(0, 400)); lineWalker.add(w3);

for (int i = 0; i < lineWalker.size(); i++) { Walker3 mw3 = (Walker3) lineWalker.get(i); mw3.run(); } //mouse avoid for (int i = 0; i < num; i++) { things[i].update(); things[i].run(); } saveFrame(“barcode3_####.jpg”);}

GHELFI

PHASE 1 PHASE 2 PHASE 3 CODE

DNA

PERSPECTIV

E

Albert Renger-Patzsch (1897-1966) 2001: Space Odyssey

PERSPECTIV

E

“[...] the biomimics are showing us that nature is the ultimate inventor, and there is much more that we as observers do not know – perhaps cannot know. By forming alliances with her, by using biology-friendly materials and letting evolution work its magic (even without knowing how it works), we’re bound to come out ahead of where we would be with our own linear, digital, rigidly controlled logic”

Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry, (New York, Harper Perennial, 1997), 237

Plexus - installation, Gabriel Dawe Still image from film 2001: Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick

Looking for the Vanishing Point,

PERSPECTIV

E

Quantity has a quality all its own Joseph Stalin

DRAWIN

G

PERSPECTIV

E

PERSPECTIV

EGHELFI

[1]Alberti, Léon Battista, De pictura, Paris, Macula, 1994, p. 199

PERSPECTIV

E

GHELFI

Processing experiment