Daniel Koehler
Daniel Koehler is an urbanist, architect, and assistant professor for architecture computation at UT Austin. Before, Daniel researched at the Bartlett in London and Innsbruck University, where he wrote his Ph.D., published as “The Mereological City,” a study on the part-relationships between architecture and its city in the modern period. Daniel’s work has been exhibited in Prague, Milan, Venice, Graz, Montreal, London, Austin, and is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His current research focuses on the implications of artificial intelligence, on the design practice of cities and their architecture.
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Books by Daniel Koehler
Mereological design begins with the sampling of parts, the translation, and the extension of part conditions. In a careful mixing of several mereological terms accurate and diverse arrangements can be achieved. Naturally, any building consists of an uncountable number of part-conditions. It is not the aim of this research to represent the complexity of a building just through part-descriptions. Rather it offers a strategic possibility to navigate as a designer with and beyond bureaucratic means. The research presented here can be seen as a transdisciplinary study introducing mereological aspects into architecture and urban design. Therefore, the research shows and measures itself on compositional qualities and their potential at an urban scale only. It shows how complex compositions can be articulated by a collection of part-to-whole relations.
The Projects
The three research projects outlined here, consider compositional qualities on different scales, such as house of walls, house of rooms, and house of houses.
Meros investigated into large building figurations of AI-driven wall figures based on vernacular building types in Southern China. Their research offers a digital reading of a house as a nesting of enclosures within data sets.
Wa(o)nderYards sampled courtyards as the classical void-room of a house. Focusing on occupational restrictions their research shows how shifts of combinatorial granularity enable diversity through the repetition of simple room samples.
Scendobia read the house through its spines: the stair, the corridor, and the escalator. Reading the house as quantitative access pattern their research composes synthetic traffic parts via configurational learning algorithms.
The Research:
The research presented here can be seen as a transdisciplinary study introducing mereological aspects into architecture and urban design. Therefore, the research shows and measures itself on compositional qualities and their potential at an urban scale only. It shows how complex compositions can be articulated by a collection of part-to-whole relations. The four research projects, and two texts outlined here, develop distributative descriptions of urban form, each specifically for itself and as an alternative to typological thinking.
Blockerties
The project Blockerties deliberates property relations by hacking economic forms of distributive computation. By provoking partitionings of distributive chains, the project offers a new public at the gaps of computational enfilades of hyper-trading. Transferring the blockchain’s core concepts of data distribution through ledgers, to patterns of shared and private owned spaces it can lead to what the project proposes as polyphonic spaces, with overlapping uses. Running speculations similar to economic narratives, we create chains that can increase private or shared spaces or create voids or dense chains. The aim is to decrease the cost and at the same time reverting the ration of private to shared. We search for open free spaces, high connectivity and distribution of value that give us the cheapest form. This aggregatory method is capable of creating polyphonic spaces with inherent features, like navigation, and structural definitions that can on the same time be eligible to diverse readings.
NPoche
Gaining knowledge and making decisions nowadays depends more and more on the compu- tation of large quantities, in short: Big-Data. NPoche as a research-by-design project uses those reflections to transform the classical term of a Poche into a contemporary methodology that enables disciplinary access to methods of data classification. NPoche shows how classification algorithms, in the specific K-means clustering, can be used in interplay with architectural form. Multi-dimensional classification is used to sort simulations consisting of self-aggregating housing parts. Resembling Poché as indicating sameness, agglomerations were selected which formulate the same local conditions, namely access, light, open space, and ventilation: computational Poché-Space turns into a City of Sameness.
Enframes
Enframes challenges topology with mereology. Refraining the famous statement that a city is not a tree, the project Enframes considers the city as a quantity of corners. The corner as the bumping into each other, the city as the physical enframing of exchange. The corner is interpreted as a coincidental meeting point embracing places and enclosing crossings. In the footsteps of O.M. Ungers space-concept of enframing, the project accelerates the urban coincident, condensing the topological measure of cityness into a configuration of partial frames.
iiOOOI
The project iiOOOi encapsulates the distinction between an inside and an outside into a partial entity turning a building into a city of labyrinthic enfilades. iiOOOI begins with the sampling of inside-outside situations between buildings and their city. With this, a city can be computed as a sequence of nested (in-)terriors, lined up one after the other, and into each other: as an urban enfilade.
Thinking Architecture as a Form of Pre-human Computation
This text distinguishes between an inside and an outside first and foremost as the difference between being well- and non-tempered. Indeed, (in-)terriors expose a kind of computation that starts from a thermodynamic discreteness which enables a particular space sequence that helps to experience different levels of space through one building and brings up the notion of the building-in-a building. Beyond being a technical void space, the project
sees ventilation as a mode of pre-human computation at the urban scale.
Synthesizing HyperUmwelten
The text investigates on a blockchain’s composition as well as the environment that they are able to create, concepts like Jacob Uexkull’s ‘Umwelt’ and Timothy Morton’s ‘Hyperobject’ are synthesised into a new definition of the Hyperumwelt. What it is described in a theoretical basis is an object capable of creating its own environment. Upscaling these definitions, the essay describes objects with unique and strong compositional characteristics that act as closed black boxes and are able through distribution to create large scale effects.
Papers by Daniel Koehler
acting as strategic interfaces bridging architectural design and policy-making. Moving forward, can typological thinking assist in understanding generative-AI workflows from an architectural perspective? Moreover, can one redesign types as instrumental interfaces once again linking design to their environmental contexts?
The investigation examines the compositional characteristics of AI-generated images of buildings across various cities. A synthetic dataset of 150,000 images was segmented into individual building segments, enabling a statistical analysis of compositional features across 5,600 cities. The paper introduces how LLI models portray diverse local typologies and differentiates these using computational metrics for big-data analysis. It explores the LLI’s potential to assess the carbon footprint of places by analyzing materials, building parts, and construction methods within the generated images through image segmentation. Despite only a real-world alignment of approximately 70 percent in the synthetic data, such databases can augment existing building datasets. Synthetic datasets are particularly useful in hard-to-access contexts and in past or projective settings. They allow for the precise staging of specific content, such as building typologies or perspectives. Computational articulation of types reveals specific attributes that transcend linear classification regimes, aiding here in assessing places’ carbon footprints through multilayered linkages. The analysis indicates that embodied carbon in places does not align with geographical carbon classifications, offering more differentiated resolutions. Furthermore, the embodied carbon, composed of multiple materials, is not visually apparent, suggesting a need for local and project-specific adaptations.
Cities are always changing, and so are the ways we build them. No doubt you've heard of artificial intelligence, but did you see how this technology enables a fusion between architecture and forests? Somewhere between a fairy dream and an exciting vision of the future, the outcome of this innovation makes us look forward with curiosity to what is to come.
city from buildings? For the architect Camillo Sitte, it was this literality of
„city-building“ and the search for its artistic fundamentals that established the art of building cities as a discipline in its own right, when Sitte wrote his treatise: „The Art of Building Cities: City building according to its artistic fundamentals.“1 When we take „city-building“ seriously, assume that it is possible to build „city literally“, and that the city, as building, contains a physical reality and is thus being-in – in an entity. With this, city-building, or simply urban design, begins with the idea of a reality residing within an architectural figure.
Mereological design begins with the sampling of parts, the translation, and the extension of part conditions. In a careful mixing of several mereological terms accurate and diverse arrangements can be achieved. Naturally, any building consists of an uncountable number of part-conditions. It is not the aim of this research to represent the complexity of a building just through part-descriptions. Rather it offers a strategic possibility to navigate as a designer with and beyond bureaucratic means. The research presented here can be seen as a transdisciplinary study introducing mereological aspects into architecture and urban design. Therefore, the research shows and measures itself on compositional qualities and their potential at an urban scale only. It shows how complex compositions can be articulated by a collection of part-to-whole relations.
The Projects
The three research projects outlined here, consider compositional qualities on different scales, such as house of walls, house of rooms, and house of houses.
Meros investigated into large building figurations of AI-driven wall figures based on vernacular building types in Southern China. Their research offers a digital reading of a house as a nesting of enclosures within data sets.
Wa(o)nderYards sampled courtyards as the classical void-room of a house. Focusing on occupational restrictions their research shows how shifts of combinatorial granularity enable diversity through the repetition of simple room samples.
Scendobia read the house through its spines: the stair, the corridor, and the escalator. Reading the house as quantitative access pattern their research composes synthetic traffic parts via configurational learning algorithms.
The Research:
The research presented here can be seen as a transdisciplinary study introducing mereological aspects into architecture and urban design. Therefore, the research shows and measures itself on compositional qualities and their potential at an urban scale only. It shows how complex compositions can be articulated by a collection of part-to-whole relations. The four research projects, and two texts outlined here, develop distributative descriptions of urban form, each specifically for itself and as an alternative to typological thinking.
Blockerties
The project Blockerties deliberates property relations by hacking economic forms of distributive computation. By provoking partitionings of distributive chains, the project offers a new public at the gaps of computational enfilades of hyper-trading. Transferring the blockchain’s core concepts of data distribution through ledgers, to patterns of shared and private owned spaces it can lead to what the project proposes as polyphonic spaces, with overlapping uses. Running speculations similar to economic narratives, we create chains that can increase private or shared spaces or create voids or dense chains. The aim is to decrease the cost and at the same time reverting the ration of private to shared. We search for open free spaces, high connectivity and distribution of value that give us the cheapest form. This aggregatory method is capable of creating polyphonic spaces with inherent features, like navigation, and structural definitions that can on the same time be eligible to diverse readings.
NPoche
Gaining knowledge and making decisions nowadays depends more and more on the compu- tation of large quantities, in short: Big-Data. NPoche as a research-by-design project uses those reflections to transform the classical term of a Poche into a contemporary methodology that enables disciplinary access to methods of data classification. NPoche shows how classification algorithms, in the specific K-means clustering, can be used in interplay with architectural form. Multi-dimensional classification is used to sort simulations consisting of self-aggregating housing parts. Resembling Poché as indicating sameness, agglomerations were selected which formulate the same local conditions, namely access, light, open space, and ventilation: computational Poché-Space turns into a City of Sameness.
Enframes
Enframes challenges topology with mereology. Refraining the famous statement that a city is not a tree, the project Enframes considers the city as a quantity of corners. The corner as the bumping into each other, the city as the physical enframing of exchange. The corner is interpreted as a coincidental meeting point embracing places and enclosing crossings. In the footsteps of O.M. Ungers space-concept of enframing, the project accelerates the urban coincident, condensing the topological measure of cityness into a configuration of partial frames.
iiOOOI
The project iiOOOi encapsulates the distinction between an inside and an outside into a partial entity turning a building into a city of labyrinthic enfilades. iiOOOI begins with the sampling of inside-outside situations between buildings and their city. With this, a city can be computed as a sequence of nested (in-)terriors, lined up one after the other, and into each other: as an urban enfilade.
Thinking Architecture as a Form of Pre-human Computation
This text distinguishes between an inside and an outside first and foremost as the difference between being well- and non-tempered. Indeed, (in-)terriors expose a kind of computation that starts from a thermodynamic discreteness which enables a particular space sequence that helps to experience different levels of space through one building and brings up the notion of the building-in-a building. Beyond being a technical void space, the project
sees ventilation as a mode of pre-human computation at the urban scale.
Synthesizing HyperUmwelten
The text investigates on a blockchain’s composition as well as the environment that they are able to create, concepts like Jacob Uexkull’s ‘Umwelt’ and Timothy Morton’s ‘Hyperobject’ are synthesised into a new definition of the Hyperumwelt. What it is described in a theoretical basis is an object capable of creating its own environment. Upscaling these definitions, the essay describes objects with unique and strong compositional characteristics that act as closed black boxes and are able through distribution to create large scale effects.
acting as strategic interfaces bridging architectural design and policy-making. Moving forward, can typological thinking assist in understanding generative-AI workflows from an architectural perspective? Moreover, can one redesign types as instrumental interfaces once again linking design to their environmental contexts?
The investigation examines the compositional characteristics of AI-generated images of buildings across various cities. A synthetic dataset of 150,000 images was segmented into individual building segments, enabling a statistical analysis of compositional features across 5,600 cities. The paper introduces how LLI models portray diverse local typologies and differentiates these using computational metrics for big-data analysis. It explores the LLI’s potential to assess the carbon footprint of places by analyzing materials, building parts, and construction methods within the generated images through image segmentation. Despite only a real-world alignment of approximately 70 percent in the synthetic data, such databases can augment existing building datasets. Synthetic datasets are particularly useful in hard-to-access contexts and in past or projective settings. They allow for the precise staging of specific content, such as building typologies or perspectives. Computational articulation of types reveals specific attributes that transcend linear classification regimes, aiding here in assessing places’ carbon footprints through multilayered linkages. The analysis indicates that embodied carbon in places does not align with geographical carbon classifications, offering more differentiated resolutions. Furthermore, the embodied carbon, composed of multiple materials, is not visually apparent, suggesting a need for local and project-specific adaptations.
Cities are always changing, and so are the ways we build them. No doubt you've heard of artificial intelligence, but did you see how this technology enables a fusion between architecture and forests? Somewhere between a fairy dream and an exciting vision of the future, the outcome of this innovation makes us look forward with curiosity to what is to come.
city from buildings? For the architect Camillo Sitte, it was this literality of
„city-building“ and the search for its artistic fundamentals that established the art of building cities as a discipline in its own right, when Sitte wrote his treatise: „The Art of Building Cities: City building according to its artistic fundamentals.“1 When we take „city-building“ seriously, assume that it is possible to build „city literally“, and that the city, as building, contains a physical reality and is thus being-in – in an entity. With this, city-building, or simply urban design, begins with the idea of a reality residing within an architectural figure.