Architecture

Uuringu käigus viidi läbi 8 ajurünnakut, 1 veebiküsitlus, 30 intervjuud, 2 workshopi, 2 jalutuskäiku piirkonnas ning lõpuüritus, mis kutsus ühiskohtumisele kõiki piirkonna aktiivsemaid inimesi ja organisatsioone. Uuringu käigus kuulutati välja konkurss Telliskivi Loomelinnaku ja Katla ühendamiseks ning avati uuringu veebileht Facebookis ("Põhja-Tallinn on uus Soho").

Contribution to the BEL:EST workshop, exhibition and lectures in the framework of the Estonia presidency ot the Council of the European Union. "Common Ground" reinvents the identiy of european official buildings through the symbolic value of abstract regulations and standards.status: publishe

Agent based design systems could provide useful decision help for architects working on spatial planning tasks that involve large number of actors or deal with complex urban situations. These systems are especially helpful in bridging the gap between concrete design proposals and high-level design abstractions such as frequency and flow diagrams. Every attempt to use computational design agents in the planning process will automatically raise many fundamental issues about spatial perception and representation of the environment. The paper discusses these issues in the light of some recent agent based simulations. Two case studies are presented in order to demonstrate different uses of computational agents in urban design. The first study shows how a simple agent-based design system placed in an urban context becomes a creative production tool. The second one reveals analytical capabilities of an agent system in urban environments.

For decades, cybernetics, systems theorists and researchers in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life have been looking for methods of building intelligent computer applications that can solve complex problems. By nature, many design problems are complex and solving these requires a certain degree of intelligence. Therefore, it comes as no surprise, that sophisticated computational applications have become increasingly popular amongst academics and practitioners in various design disciplines. Despite the recent success of generative design methods, there are many new modelling paradigms from AI and AL research that remain largely unexplored in the context of architectural and urban design. One of such paradigms is multi-agent modelling. Although thoroughly explored and implemented in a diverse range of subject areas from social sciences to economics, design disciplines have largely refrained from deploying multi-agent systems. This thesis explores multi-agent systems for conceptual design development – for generating circulation diagrams. Besides studying several known models in the architectural and urban design context, a few novel ones are proposed. Instead of looking at existing urban and architectural theory, the source of inspiration for building circulation models comes from processes found in nature where the movement based on local navigational decisions lead to the emergence of highly complex and adaptable networks. Following the synthetic modelling approach, it is argued that studying and building simple agent based models creates in-depth knowledge about underlying principles of network development processes and allows one to gradually move towards building more sophisticated models. Once the principles of generating circulation systems are well understood, one can use these for creative purposes in designing circulation in buildings and settlements. The main aim of this thesis is to develop and expose generative methods for the early stages of the design process. By investigating the ways of building, validating and controlling generative models, it is demonstrated how these models can be integrated into the design work flow.

This paper reports on the computational modelling research
investigating spatial organisations often associated with unplanned settlements. Such spatial agglomerates are composed of several collocated but autonomous units (agents) that share common facilities and infrastructure (e.g. circulation). Depending on the context, units in the agglomerate represent individual dwellings, apartments or abstract spatial geometry. The paper presents early prototype models that can be interpreted at various scale, and a computational model for
generating organic settlement layouts. The originality of the research resides within a new multi-agent algorithm for creating spatial organisations. The agglomeration process benefits from two distinct generative design strategies – self-organisation and adaptive development strategy. While the self-organisation accounts for the emergence of the global structure in the agglomeration, the adaptive development strategy ensures that the basic environmental and spatial requirements of each individual unit are satisfied.

Marshall McLuhan once said in his book Understanding Media that ‘Environments are invisible. Their ground rules evade easy perception.’ Evasive perception leads to fuzzy representations as shown through Kevin Lynch’s mental maps and the Situationists’ psycho-geographies. Eventually, spatial representations have to be described through abstractions based on some embedded rules of environmental interaction. These rules and methods of abstraction serve to understand cognition of space. The Centre for Evolutionary Computing in Architecture (CECA) at the University of East London has focused for the last 5 years on methods of cognitive spatial descriptions, based largely on either behavioural patterns (i.e., Miranda 2000 or Raafat 2004) or topological machines (i.e., Derix 2001, Ireland 2002 or Benoudjit 2004). The former being agent based, the latter (neural) network based. This year’s selection of student work constitutes a combination of cognitive agents perceptive networks, and comprises three theses:

This paper investigates conceptual modeling of circulation in settlements using agent-based systems. It explains and compares two different types of model that highlight diametrically opposed architectural tasks in respect to movement. While the first model explores the case where the agents’ movement defines the circulation, the latter builds towards the argument that good circulation can be achieved via self-organization within the agent colony. The first type of computational model generates networks that are directly informed by the acts of movement and circulation is a direct result of agents interacting with their environment. Circulation in the second model is seen as an integral part of the morphogenesis of the settlement geometry. The two models help drawing the distinction between two different notions of agency in design. On one hand agency is seen as a group of actors that organizes and modifies the design solutions or its representations. On the other hand, the configuration and structure of agency becomes a design solution per se.

This paper discusses the results of an extended pedestrian movement project carried out in the center of Tallinn, Estonia. Having gone through several rounds of in situ studies and software prototyping, we present a synthetic method for modelling data of urban qualities as perceived by individual pedestrians. The proposed method includes capturing the walkability of city elements as a landscape of explicit values. This landscape is turned into proximity fields that in turn are fed into an agent-based model for simulating the route selection mechanism of individual pedestrians. The described model is used to demonstrate how each simulated pedestrian is influenced by the perceived qualities of urban environment. Based on our observations and computational modelling experiments, we argue that pedestrian traffic in the city can be successfully simulated with agent-based models. Furthermore, such simulation models, when finely calibrated in the field observations, allow urban planners, city authorities and decision makers to evaluate the impact of future urban design scenarios to pedestrian flows in the city.

The master thesis studies building collectives as an alternative method for housing development. The work relies on the examples of German building groups in order to understand what the benefits that collective building offers are and how they function. The aim of the work is to understand how self-initiated building collectives could function in Estonia.

This thesis examines the connection between urban festivals and perception. It is argued that the research of festivals thus far has mainly focused on the impacts concerning tourism, economy and the city image. This thesis aims to explain how events in urban space impact the perception of the participants through analysing UIT festival as a case study. The thesis draws on qualitative data gathered from the participants and volunteers of UIT by using the method of focus groups. The analysis focuses on the verbal data as well as the interaction of the groups. The analysis of the interviews narrates how different participants of the festival perceive the city in general as well as describes the possible effects of the events to the perception. Qualitative data is connected with theories of perception and experience. Ultimately, the aim is to understand the role of the urban festivals in contemporary cities.

This paper builds towards the argument that pedestrian traffic in the city can be successfully simulated with agent-based computational models if pedestrians' movement patterns are appropriately studied first. Furthermore, such simulation models, when finely calibrated and supported by onsite observations, allow planners to evaluate different urban design scenarios.We present a pilot study carried out in the centre of Tallinn, and discuss a way of how pedestrian movement simulations can be conceived. In the pilot study we recorded some 120 traces of pedestrians' movement and developed a prototype of an agent-based computational model to simulate this movement. Additionally we investigated the possibility of including solar analysis into the computational model. Already this short exercise offered us some interesting insights into how certain spatial qualities and features can drive pedestrian traffic making urban walkers to verge off the shortest routes. The pilot study was ...

This study will compare the results of measuring Urban Complexity using the Shannon-Wiener index in two different methods. Using a joint dataset retrieved from Foursquare API, we will measure the degree of urban complexity of every street: 1) relating every amenity to the closest street segment in a computational way and then applying the calculation to the segments; and 2) applying the calculation to every cell of a grid that will be combined with the street network afterwards. The selected case study is the city of London, and the dataset employed will be retrieved from Foursquare. Over 79,000 venues were collected and classified in over 660 categories. In order to proceed to the analysis, these 660 categories will be reduced to 10 based on the classification of activities observed in the public space from the traditional urban discipline. Then the urban complexity index of each street segment of London will be measured as a simultaneous calculation of the density and diversity of collected and classified economic activities.

This paper presents a live and tested solution that enables home buyers to choose and customise their future homes in a web browser. It allows future owners and residents to configure and visualise their home in 3D but also keep it affordable by displaying the construction costs back to users in real-time. The proposed solution is analysed in the context of current housing market, excising web and BIM technologies and compared to currently available solutions. Additionally, we have been tracking visitor behaviour by using web analytics and can draw some conclusions about its performance.

This paper presents a live and tested solution that enables home buyers to choose and customise their future homes in a web browser. It allows future owners and residents to configure and visualise their home in 3D but also keep it affordable by displaying the construction costs back to users in real-time. The proposed solution is analysed in the context of current housing market, excising web and BIM technologies and compared to currently available solutions. Additionally, we have been tracking visitor behaviour by using web analytics and can draw some conclusions about its performance.

This paper presents a live and tested solution that enables home buyers to choose and customise their future homes in a web browser. It allows future owners and residents to configure and visualise their home in 3D but also keep it affordable by displaying the construction costs back to users in real-time. The proposed solution is analysed in the context of current housing market, excising web and BIM technologies and compared to currently available solutions. Additionally, we have been tracking visitor behaviour by using web analytics and can draw some conclusions about its performance.

Herkko Labi (Telliskivi Loomelinnak) uuringu juht ja sisuline toimetaja, "Tulevikustsenaariumid" Maria Hansar (Katel) uuringu järelvaataja, "Tulevikustsenaariumid" Karin Tõugu (arhitekt) "Kiht: Ruum", "Kiht: Üldküsitlus", kaartide kujundus Aet Ader (arhitekt) "Kiht: Ruum", "Kiht: Üldküsitlus", kaartide kujundus Ulrika Rosenblad (Linnalabor) "Kiht: Inimene" Maarja Saar (Linnalabor) "Kiht: Inimene" Kadri Vaher (Linnalabor) "Kiht: Inimene" Yoko Alender (arhitekt) "Kiht: Ettevõtlus" Priit Juurmann (Arhitektuurikeskus) "Kiht: Ettevõtlus" Margit Argus (Kaos Arhitektid) "Kiht: Müüt" Margit Aule (Kaos Arhitektid) "Kiht: Müüt" Kaarel Nõmmik (ERKIdisain) trükise graafiline disainer, kaartide kujundus Uuringu käigus viidi läbi 8 ajurünnakut, 1 veebiküsitlus, 30 intervjuud, 2 workshopi, 2 jalutuskäiku piirkonnas ning lõpuüritus, mis kutsus ühiskohtumisele kõiki piirkonna aktiivsemaid inimesi ja organisatsioone. Uuringu käigus kuulutati välja konkurss Telliskivi Loomelinnaku ja Katla ühendamiseks ning avati uuringu veebileht Facebookis ("Põhja-Tallinn on uus Soho"). Nagu eespool kirjeldatud, on antud uurimuse põhiosaks lisaks geograafilistele kaartidele piirkonna fenomeni kihtide analüüs. Mida uurimuse erinevad kihid täpselt vaatlevad?