I’m discussing the notion of bottom-up approach to design in my newest article on sztuka-architektury.pl (full text in polish can be found here).

I begin with a couple of examples from everyday surroundings. A flock of birds serves as an example for the argument about systems governed only by a set of local relationships. It’s an ubiquitous example in this kind of discussion. Later I move on to computational models. Here a deterministic model of 1 dimensional cellular automata discussed by Stephen Wolfram in “The New Kind of Science” is mentioned.

In order to move the discussion closer to the built environment, I move on to description UCL Depthmap by Alasdair Turner. UCL Depthmap is a software for agent-based simulation of pedestrian movement through architectural and urban environments (free for academic use). The simulation exhibits a significant degree of correlation with actual movement of visitors to the British Museum (below).

Next work to mention is the Brooklyn Pigeon project by Aranda and Lasch. The duet from New York city tried to establish the rules underlying the already mentioned birds’ flocking by gathering empirical data. The project did not success, but Aranda and Lasch pursued the bottom-up strategy anyway. They devised a generative procedure to create “Rules of Six” – a scale-less installation on display in Museum of Modern Art in NY (see Chris Lasch talking about this project). I further argue that Aranda and Lasch achieve a truly bottom-up process, yet they do not achieve the efficiency and effectiveness that nature is able to achieve through the same method, simply because the rules governing the process are not informed by physical constraints. Limits of fabrication method or the context of the installation could be considered as such constraints.

I finally argue that bottom-up process are not better than a top-down approach by definition. Designers will only arrive close to nature effectiveness if they will attempt to inscribe performance into their generative procedures. The scene for such attempts grows as architectural developments reach remarkable scales (Kansai Airport, West Kowloon Canopy, City of Masdar). But a successful bottom-up strategy in architectural design is still awaiting development.