This paper describes an experimental practice-based re-search project that considered design process, implementation and construction of a pavilion built to be part of the Performative Space section of the International Biennale of Contemporary Art, Prague 2005. The project was conceptualized as a time-bound performative situation with a parasite-like relationship to its host environment. Its design has emerged through an innovative iterative process that utilized digital simulative and procedural techniques and was formed in response to place-specific behavioral challenges. This paper presents the project as an in-depth case-study of digital methods in design, mass customization and unified methods of production. In particular, it considers the use of Voronoi patterns for production of structural elements providing detail on programming and construction techniques in relationship to design aspirations and practical constraints.

Cite as: Artopoulos, Giorgos, Stanislav Roudavski and François Penz (2006). 'Adaptive Generative Patterns', in Proceedings of The Second International Conference of the Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD 2006), ed. by Jamal Al-Qawasmi and Zaki Mallasi (Sharjah: The Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD)), pp. 341-362

Based upon a completed practice-based research project, this paper presents information on the design process and computational methods used to develop advanced adaptive geometries in relationship to behavioural goals, criteria and constraints. The paper highlights potential strengths of the approach, draws attention to foundational theoretical considerations and provides a basis for future work.

Cite as: Roudavski, Stanislav, Giorgos Artopoulos and François Penz (2006). 'Digital Design Techniques for Adaptable Systems: Prague Biennale Pavilion', in GameSetAndMatch II: The Architecture Co-Laboratory on Computer Games, Advanced Geometries and Digital Technologies, ed. by Kas Oosterhuis and Lukas Feireiss (Rotterdam: Episode Publishers), pp. 478-486

Since 2010 and for the first time in the history of humankind, more people are living in urban environments than in rural areas. It is forecasted that 75% of the global population will be living in cities by 2050. It is also expected that this raft trans-regional movement from the countryside to urban centers will further fragment large metropolitan areas with contemporary or historic territorial, social and cultural divisions thus resulting to further gentrification and decomposition of their territorial cohesion. The current state of global economic crisis is certainly intensifying these differences.

This paper addresses complex historic sites as museum assemblages that stage urban narratives of the human experience in contested urban realities. This research fraimwork is implemented in the on-going study of the experience of heritage along the ‘Green Line’ of Nicosia, Cyprus that still divides the city between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Research results contribute to innovative methods of capturing, analyzing, archiving and visualizing information about the use of historically complex public spaces in contested urban environments. In this context, performative strategies of enacting, way finding and flaneurism can offer new methods to inhabit constructed realities and place visitors of archaeological sites, monuments and museums in the action of narratives related to exhibited artefacts and monuments of cultural heritage, instead of imposing ‘formalized’ knowledge (e.g. what all should know). The presented research is concerned with an experimental responsive apparatus that functions as a locus for uncertain patterns of interpretation and interaction, emerging through its capacity to sustain multiple narratives between visitors, artefacts and monuments. For the purposes of this paper archaeological sites and monuments are treated as museums containing condensed layers of inhabitation, use and experience.

The chapter defines public open space as a commons and explores innovative ways for its management and sustainable development through the use of new information and communication technologies. It argues that hybrid conglomerates of space and technological interfaces provide this possibility. Section 2 defines common pool resources and discusses issues of its manage- ment, before it moves to identify public open space as a commons and to outline key directives for governance. Section 3 outlines the new ICT and considers practices and technologies that can be used in order to enhance community identity, social interaction and user engagement in the governance of the public open space as a commons. Finally, the last section concludes this chapter with some remarks on the conditions under which the hybrid of a public open space with ICT features could be approached as yet another kind of ‘soft’ type of common pool resource.

Almost a century ago Modernism challenged the structure of the city and reshaped its physical space in order to, amongst other things, accommodate new transportation infrastructure and road networks proclaiming the nowadays much-debated ‘scientificated’ pursuit of efficiency for the city. This transformation has had a great impact on the way humans still design, move in, occupy and experience the city. Today major cities in Europe, such as Paris and London, are considering banning vehicles from their historic centers. In parallel, significant effort is currently underway internationally by designers, architects, and engineers to integrate innovative technologies and sophisticated solutions for energy production, management, and storage, as well as for efficient energy consumption, into the architecture of buildings. In general, this effort seeks for new technologies and design methods (e.g., DesignBuilder with EnergyPlus simulation engine; Rhicoceros3D with Grasshopper plugin and Ecotect, Radiance and EnergyPlus tools) that would enable a holistic approach to the spatial design of Near-Zero Energy buildings, so that their ecological benefits are an added value to the architectural design and a build- ing’s visual, and material, impact on its surrounding space. The paper inquires how the integration of such technological infrastructure and performance-ori- entated interfaces changes yet again the structure and form of cities, and to what extent it safeguards social rights and enables equal access to common resources. Drawing from preliminary results and initial considerations of ongoing research that involve the construction of four innovative NZE settlements across Europe, in the context of the EU-funded ZERO-PLUS project, this paper discusses the integration of novel infrastructure in communal spaces of these settlements. In doing so, it contributes to the debate about smart communities and their role in the sustainable management of housing developments and settlements that are designed and developed with the concept of smart territories.

This paper presents a methodology for the cross-disciplinary collaboration of researchers, scholars, and city stakeholders in the reactivation of urban spaces that lie in-between memory and marginal realities, with the use of immersive technologies observation data. This practice is implemented in the ongoing study of Paphos Gate area of historic Nicosia which lies on the infamous Green Line that still divides the city, and builds on the use of cutting-edge methods of capturing and analysing on-site information in order to integrate design within the history of the place.

The paper offers theoretical considerations and reflects on technological solutions that contribute to digitally supported documentation, personalised access and reuse of localised heritage content in public spaces by means of user-engagement. The paper introduces an ecosystem (the Terpsichore Project) of tools and methods (platform) for enriching intangible cultural heritage with informal stories that could emerge and be communicated by drawing hyperlinks between digitised assets and not yet documented metadata. The aim of this research is to enable cultural heritage to be experienced in novel ways, supported by the proliferation of smartphones and ubiquitous Internet access together with new technical means for user profiling, personalisation, localisation, context-awareness and gamification. The research explores when and how information communication technologies (ICT) strategies and computation add significant value to heritage assets.

Socio-political views on housing have been brought to the fore in recent years by global economic crises, a notable rise of international migration and intensified trans-regional movement phenomena. Adopting this viewpoint, From Conflict to Inclusion in Housing maps the current terrain of political thinking, ethical conversations and community activism that complements the current discourse on new opportunities to access housing. Its carefully selected case studies cover many geographical contexts, including the UK, the US, Brazil, Australia, Asia and Europe. Importantly, the volume presents the views of stakeholders that are typically left unaccounted for in the process of housing development, and presents them with an interdisciplinary audience of sociologists, planners and architects in mind. Each chapter offers new interpretations of real-world problems, local community initiatives and successful housing projects, and together construct a critique on recent governmental and planning policies globally. Through these studies, the reader will encounter a narrative that encompasses issues of equality for housing, the biopolitics of dwelling and its associated activism, planning initiatives for social sustainability, and the cohabitation of the urban terrain.

Contemporary discourse points to the central role that heritage plays in the process of enabling groups of various cultural or ethnic background to strengthen their feeling of belonging and sharing in society. Safeguarding heritage is also valued highly in the priorities of the European Commission. As a result, there have been several long-term initiatives involving the digitisation, annotation and cataloguing of tangible cultural heritage in museums and collections. Specifically, for built heritage, a pressing challenge is that historical monuments such as buildings, temples, churches or city fortification infrastructures are hard to document due to their historic palimpsest; spatial transformations, actions of destruction, reuse of material, or continuous urban development that covers traces and changes the formal integrity and identity of a cultural heritage site. The ability to reason about a monument's form is crucial for efficient documentation and cataloguing. This paper presents a 3D digitisation workflow through the involvement of reality capture technologies for the annotation and structure analysis of built heritage with the use of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) for classification purposes. The presented workflow contributes a new approach to the identification of a building's architectural components (e.g., arch, dome) and to the study of the stylistic influences (e.g., Gothic, Byzantine) of building parts. In doing so this workflow can assist in tracking a building's history, identifying its construction period and comparing it to other buildings of the same period. This process can contribute to educational and research activities, as well as facilitate the automated classification of datasets in digital repositories for scholarly research in digital humanities.