“Traditional vernacular building is accomplished by executing the process. There are no intermediate phases like a set of drawings, working drawings, drawings of details. The communication is direct from person to person. … Exact measurements and other relevant numeric details are decided along the process of building. The end result is unpredictable in detail, but is performed according to a agreed upon set of simple rules.”

“Stepping one level up can be understood as stepping out of a world of plans and sections into a truly 3-dimensional space. Now we step out of mass-production and repetition into the realm of mass-customization and complexity, made possible by computational programming. We will step one level up and look at the world from there. As we will see later, I will propose to step another level up to enter the world of swarming behavioral space, leaving frozen 3d space like an experienced time-traveller would, or leaving Flatland like an inhabitant of Space.”

“Intelligence is not something which can be programmed from top down in a manner of reverse engineering, but is an awareness that emerges from bottom up through a process of evolution by building relations between the nodes of the system. Intelligence is not necessarily aware of itself as being intelligent. Intelligence can very well emerge from swarming relatively stupid components. Together they perform as something complex, which humans may interpret as intelligent. Intelligence as I use it here is not seen as human intelligence. It is regarded as emergent behavior coming up from the complex interactions between less complex actuators.”

“ONL basically regards each node as an intelligent point which is ‘peer to peer’ looking to neighbouring points, and acting according to a simple set of programmed rules to form a complex consistent structure.”

“Boids as developed by Craig Reynolds are active members of a flock calculating in real time their positions in relation to each other. Simple rules are underpinning their behavior. Each Boid computes a limited number of simple rules: Do not come to too close to your neighbors, match your velocity with your neighbors, try to move towards the center of the mass of Boids. None of these rules says: form a flock, the rules are entirely local, referring to what a local Boid can see and perform in its immediate vicinity. And yet the flock forms, and is recognizable as a complex whole. The importance for the procedure of architectural design here is that one does not need to define the exact overall shape beforehand in order to group the individual members together into a consistent whole. Boids can be interpreted as the flocking nodes of a constructive mesh. The designer could work with simple rules starting from the related positions of the nodes to generate the relevant data for mass-customized production. Also the behavior of the nodes might be used to form the shape of the building. Placing a bouncing box around the flock to limit their room to move remains a valid possibility since each building has to take into account the presence of other objects in their urban context.”

“In essence all points – comparable to the cells in a cellular automaton – are looking to its previous generation to decide what the next step will be, following some simple rules. Only by running the system one can find out to what class of result the simple rules will lead. Designing becomes running the computation, generation after generation, checking it, make changes, and run it again. Designing becomes to a much larger extent then it ever was an iterative process. In a traditional design process one iterates a limited number of times. When setting up a set of simple rules in a computation machine, one iterates in real time, that is many times per second. In turbo lingo this is designing with the speed of light, this is designing like a Formula I driver. Designing with rules, algorithms and with running the process builds the foundations for a new kind of building. These buildings are based on the behavior of an intelligent flock of swarming points, each of them executing a relatively simple rule, each of them acting according to local awareness of their immediate environment.”

“While everything we see around us in every room, in every car, on every street, in every city is based on simple computations creating complex behavior it is virtually impossible to trace back the rules. The only way to find out is to run the system, to design a system which is based on simple rules generating complexity. This awareness potentially turns designers into researchers. Designers must set up systems and run the systems in order to perform. Performative architecture brings the architect and the artist back in the genetic center from where everything we see around us is generated.”

“Buildings are Complex Adaptive Systems. This means that building relations between the nodes represents only one class of relations among many other possible and necessary relations. To evolve something as complex as a building involves many truly different actors. It is not just one system that runs in real time. It must be seen and designed as a complex set of many interrelated systems, all of them performing simple rules. In something as complex as a building, the nodes do not only communicate to other nodes, but even more to other product species. They will receive information from other systems as well, and include those data in the processing of the information, and in their behavior.”

“But the necessity remains that in order to see the world from the next level, designers must start from simple rules placed in a complex environment rather then starting from a superficially complex structure without a clear concept of how to generate the data needed for customized production.”

“As humans we must learn to relate to the dynamics of super-fast real time computational processes. We must build the computational tools for Collaborative Design and Engineering in order to meet the rich expectations created by looking at the world from one or two levels up.”

“Architecture has become a rule-based game, played by active members of a flock, communicating with other swarms. As proven above this is true for the F2F process of masscustomization, it is true for the New Kind of Building based on Real Time Behavior [RTB] of programmable pro-active structures, and it is true for the interactive process of CD&E. To be able to develop the F2F process of mass-customization one must step one level up and look at the world from there. Not looking from a top to down, but from within into the new dimension of complexity. To be able to deal with the RTB of programmable constructs one must step another level up and look at the world from the point of view that all nodes are executing their systems in real time and communicate in real time to their own kin and other species.”

Source: http://www.bk.tudelft.nl/en/about-faculty/departments/architectural-engineering-and-technology/organisation/hyperbody/research/theory/a-new-kind-of-building/2004-a-new-kind-of-building/