(Source: Alastair Gordon, Accidental Architect: Robert Motherwell, Pierre Chareau and the Quonset House of 1947, Miami: MBUS, 2014; Julie Decker & Chris Chiei, Quonset Hut: Metal Living for a Modern Age, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005; Progressive Architecture 06/1985; Barney Rosset Estate.)
Dear friends, OfHouses is pleased to introduce you to a new original series inspired by our most
recent architecture readings. For the next four weeks, we invite you to discover seven old forgotten houses picked-up from the pages of ‘The
Other Modern Movement’, Kenneth Frampton’s latest masterpiece published
last year by Yale University Press.
I eagerly await our new AI masters’ world of ultraoptimized, uncannily organic, evolving foorplans. Joel Simon:
Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project
exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and
expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts
to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways,
etc. The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the
perspective of optimization and without regard for convention,
constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of
explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high
complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding
using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such
as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm.
Adds Simon: “I have very mixed feelings about this project.”
