University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: April 10, 2008

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
Contributing Editor

They look innocent enough, these hollow, translucent urethane tubes into which are incorporated what look like rubber “springs.”

These tubes that recoil to the ceiling when someone approaches and return to their original position when the person leaves are examples of teleonomic environments, a topic of research pursued by UB architecture faculty member Omar Khan.

They hang from the ceiling into an exhibition space where they come to rest at foot level. They seem approachable.

As you draw near to them, however, they “come alive,” recoiling (literally) to the ceiling as they “sniff” your breath. The very material of which they are made has been trained, in a sense, to respond to the carbon dioxide you exhale.

When you move away from them, they “exhale” like a gang of long, living lungs, and slowly return to their original positions, apparently a little relieved that you’ve moved on.

It may seem creepy, but it’s a graphic example of how architectural environments of the future will behave—not jumping back at our approach, like a weird alien plant, but by sensing our presence or the way we behave as a change in our shared space and adjusting that space as they are “trained to do” or “learn to do,” which is to say, “appropriately.”

This quality of apparent purposefulness of the structure or function of materials and their adaptive responsiveness is referred to as teleonomy. Its name is from the field of biology and refers to the quality of “aliveness” used until now to describe living things—the only objects thought to change their responses due to adaptation. They are strange, but they have agency—the ability to exert power or influence.

Some of today’s most innovative architects, however, are conducting research into nonliving teleonomic environments. Among them are Omar Khan, assistant professor of architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning; his partner, Laura Garofalo, of the architectural practice Liminal Spaces; and a group of architects working in UB’s Center for Virtual Architecture.

Khan and Garofalo created the tubular creatures described above, which recently were featured in an installation titled “Open Columns.” But these breathing columns simply are one iteration of the basic research conducted at the center.

Khan focuses on the creation of responsive materials that react and evolve to produce teleonomic environments. These are materials that facilitate environmental reaction to the presence of human beings, plants and your cat, as well as to changing levels of humidity, temperature, noise, movement and light.

“We are interested in transitive materials,” he says, “those that don’t have a fixed performance but, either through embedded computation or inherent chemistry, can change their form. We have been working specifically with materials that have rubber as their base.

“Traditionally, rubber has taken a secondary role in the art of architectural building,” he says, “usually relegated to assisting other materials in performing such tasks as structural dampening, surface finish and weather proofing.

“Our research revisits elastomers to give rubbers and plastics a central place in architecture—a place that is unique to them because it employs their essential mutable qualities.”

An elastomer is a polymer with the property of elasticity and often is used interchangeably with rubber.

Khan explains that one measure of plastics and rubbers is hardness, which is commonly measured by the shore (udometer) test.

By shifting variations of shore throughout a rubber, he and Garofalo have produced composite elastomers made from urethane rubbers that are able to offer substantial performative difference, even though their shapes may not change.

“Subtle changes in the ratio of each component have a profound effect on the overall performance of the structure,” he says, “and while we have simulated the components in scripted environments to study their emergent behaviors, we also have produced prototypes to test our hypotheses.”

He explains, for instance, that the “Open Columns” installation illustrated how “responsive architecture” can move and reconfigure the space of inhabitation by sensing a change in carbon-dioxide levels being emitted by living beings in an environment.

“We have been working with a model of responsiveness and adaptation where a system’s goal is underspecified,” Khan says. “Hence, its behavior is self modified by a ‘learning’ process carried out over a period of time.”

In other words, the columns are “homeostatic,” another biological term that describes the tendency of a system to maintain stability while constantly adjusting to conditions necessary for the system to function properly.

“The idea here is to construct a system that doesn’t know what its best behavior is prior to being used. In other words, it needs to learn on the job. So the columns try different configurations based upon sensory inputs and retain those configurations that work to maintain their function. However, if on another day a previously good configuration doesn’t work vis-a-vis the amount of carbon dioxide it senses, they toss that configuration and replace it with one that does. It is a bit more complex than that, but that is the gist of it,” he says.

“Now, it is quite difficult to work with rubber because its elasticity and polymorphism make it difficult to accurately judge how it will perform under various circumstances,” Khan says. “It is only through empirical analysis that the material’s compressive and tensile tolerances can be gauged. With rubber composites, this is further complicated by their different shore hardness and multiple shaping and patterns,” he says.

“The task of creating effective prototypes can be likened to cooking, where not only the recipe, but the way in which the ingredients come together is crucial.”

By folding this line of inquiry into parametric models and scripted environments, the researchers are trying to understand the emergent performance of the many possible “recipes” for these materials.

These simulations also are useful speculative devices that serve as guides in the investigation or solution of a problem, pre-empting possibilities that may not have particularly useful or interesting emergent qualities.

Khan speculates that this type of architecture holds incredible potential for both sustainable and healthy environments because it provides a means for the participation of the public in the way that their environments will adapt.

“I am interested in a hypersensitive adaptable architecture that can make its inhabitants aware of things that they can’t sense,” he says, “while also providing a means for the inhabitants to influence its form and evolution.”

The “Open Columns” installation was part of the exhibition “Pask Present: An Exhibition of Art and Design Growing Out of Gordon Pask’s Cybernetic Theory and Practice” that closed last week at Atelier FÄRBERGASSE in Vienna. Khan also presented a paper on the columns and his other architecture performatives at the 19th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, also held in Vienna.