TransFORMation
Emergent Organizations for Architecture
University of Pennsylvania Studio Project
Spring Semester /2006
Studio Instructor: Ali Rahim
Site: Chicago, USA
This research studio examined the emergence and its relation to the formulation of architecture by utilizing dynamical systems in an opportunistic fashion for the generation of growth and evaluation of patterns in the development of form. The fascination of the global city resides in some extent in its qualities of mutability and instability. Absences, deficiencies, and deformations carry a transformational potential allowing within themselves diversity, conflict, and change. Emergent organizations that incorporate architecture and urban formations reflect qualities that belong to our time, such as vicariousness, transformability and the almost limitless absorption of information. Structures such as these are no longer the representation of homogenous, linear systems, but as heterogeneous non-linear systems of continuous transFORMations. These transFORMations are scale-less, accumulative and are subject to changes that shift in type and/ or in-kind and other manipulations. In addition, they bundle material, spatial and social interaction into one formation.
and to apply these to a range of familiar architectural issues. The final scale, program transFORMation, done simultaneously without any pre-conception of the scale [urban, building, or material] or program the project will house. The goal was to use strategies to produce unprecedented architectural effects that flow from topological surfaces and component arrangements in ideas were research and development of and proposal emerged out of this process and Chicago’s Drake hotel was chosen for the application. Drake hotel resides at the corner of Chicago’s main artery Lakeshore drive and Michigan Avenue facing the North Avenue beach. The project intended to replace the existing historical hotel with a distinctive form that can extend and connect the flow of people from Michigan Avenue to Lake Michigan.