Autonomous Architecture Makes Living Spaces Feel Alive

The dream of the automonous machine is nigh, or getting closer anyway. Silicon Valley has found itself in an artificial intelligence arms race after Google recently hit fast forward on its robotics division. Elsewhere, a piece of artificial intelligence named ANGELINA made a video game called To That Sect. And now UCLA researchers are exploring architectural intelligence with The Aether Project. The goal is to see how architecture could become responsive to sense-based devices that trigger “robotically actuated technology.”

Using a Leap Motion device, researchers control real-time mapped visuals projected onto a transforming surface geometry. In a video posted by co-developer Refik Anadol, a jagged, a sculptural form rotates as 3D-mapped visuals shift, illuminate, and transform into different colors on its surface.

A collaborative effort between the IDEAS platform of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design (A.UD) and the school’s Design Media Arts program, The Aether Project was created as part of the course “Architectural Intelligence: Exploring Space as an Interactive Medium,” which is led by Guvenc Ozel. The project is a collaboration with Casey Reas, Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts, and is the brainchild of Anadol, Raman Mustafa, Julietta Gil and Farzad Mirshafiei.

It’s quite evocative of Amon Tobin’s ISAM show, in which the DJ cocooned himself inside a giant cubic structure, onto which evolving video projections were mapped. What Tobin’s ISAM couldn’t do is robotically choreograph the cubic structure, let alone move it. This alone makes The Aether Project fascinating, as is the goal of making architecture autonomous, but still responsive to human input.

“The evolution of technology reveals an aspiration to place mind into matter in order to create tools that are subservient yet autonomous from humans,” the project leaders state in the video’s introduction. “Architecture as a form of technology does not exist outside of this cultural aspiration.”

“Concurrently, experiments in sensing technology express this desire to transform architecture into an intelligent form of technology that can autonomously negotiate between the human body, human psyche, the environment and other physical and perceptual parameters,” they add.

Anadol said that in the first week of class, the group was given a great matrix of informational tools. From there, they could decide which sensors, devices, and communications mechanisms they wanted to use. “As a group of people, we were highly interested in the projection side of things—the idea of a virtual layer,” said Anadol.

“Eventually the robotics part came to occupy a lot of the common ground we wanted to explore, so we moved in that direction,” he added. “Individually, each layer is put together into a whole.” The group was highly inspired by robotics, projection, and light as matter. They sought to explore the boundary of light in space—how to play with it and reduce it.

Stunning as that is, it’s still a fascinating project even if we downsize our expectations a bit and focus on how such a system can affect the physical space around us. We may see some of this intelligent architecture in the future, which will be more than enough visual and spatial information for our fragile psyches to handle. Whether it will serve some function other than looking rad is not so certain.