Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn, eds.
Routledge 2020
Select work including Limekiln Grid, House on Limekiln Line, and student work from the Streamlines, Vortices & Plumes MArch studio is featured in Carol Burn’s Essay, ‘Adaptive Systems: Environment, Site, and Building’.
Carol Burns Abstract:
‘Faced with the increasing complexity in design of buildings as well as with anthropogenic climate change, architects need new and tools to understand the interaction between individual acts of building and the larger environment. The article introduces systems theory—a highly interdisciplinary field influenced by physics, computer science, biology, ecology, management, economics, sociology, political science, and more – to focus on complex adaptive systems. Such self-organizing systems offer insights into relationships between learning, adapting, and survival. Emerging tools related to the environment, the site, and building are described, including: data-driven design, using real-time analysis and simulation with the potential to add prediction as a tool for architectural design; an energy accounting system based on thermodynamics; and a leadership model from information technology known as enterprise architect. Involving coadaptation and depending on events played out in time, adaptive systems dissolve artificial dualities, including the distinction between nature and culture, and provoke urgency for addressing complex problems in building in the Anthropocen.’