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Crisis Fronts is the Degree Project studio and seminar run by Michael Chen and Jason Lee at Pratt Institute School of Architecture.

Crisis Fronts is an ongoing inquiry into contemporary global crises that suggest new demands and agendas for architecture, and the potential afforded by parametric and generative digital design tools to engage them.

Click here to download the 2010-2011 syllabus

CRISIS FRONTS :: Cognitive Infrastructures
2010-2011

With Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons.
Justin Snider, TA

While infrastructure is conventionally understood to be the domain of municipal entities, the complexity of the contemporary city suggests that we should look to alternate models for infrastructures that exceed the speed, flexibility and intelligence of their publicly funded and managed counterparts. This line of inquiry might be thought to encompass shadow cities – those realms that operate outside of centralized administrative control, that may or may not be illicit, and that encompass practices and logistics that operate at infrastructural scales but are not public per se. Our aim will be to propose new modes of infrastructure that negotiate the city according to a set of shadow protocols. Understanding the potential of a system to be exploited for purposes that may not be in direct correspondence with the technical ambitions of that system might be the key to both a deeper understanding of the system in question and also lend insight into how that system might be then leveraged and repositioned to support new forms of material intelligence, formal innovation, new social practices, institutions, leisure, commerce, and piracy.

Whether you call it a new model, or a hack, or an add-on, cognitive infrastructure is concerned with the systematic exploitation of logistical and bureaucratic networks and their potential to engender new ways of engaging the city. To that end we will work to develop design strategies that have the potential to negotiate a broad range of data, contexts, scales, and logics. While the studio will engage a number of computational methodologies it will focus primarily on the capacity of these tools to provide a platform for strategic speculation on new paradigms for urbanism and the opportunities for social feedback and novelty that they suggest.

At stake here is not just how new forms of infrastructure emerge and what their form may be, but how architecture and urbanism might be catalyzed and transformed both through the implementation of new logics and protocols and the emergence of new social practices and behaviors. In many ways, infrastructure is unique in its capacity to inaugurate and influence new modes of spatial practice. While conditions such as climate change, urban growth, and globalization constitute a crisis front of complexity and volatility, they also call for a more lightly described, adaptable, and intelligent infrastructure. The explicit aim of this research inquiry is to empower students to engage these issues in their full complexity and to support design speculation that is at once technically, formally, and politically ambitious.

Using fiction and non-fiction sources in text and film, as well as the wealth of tabulated and real time data streams available online, the studio will consider how urban infrastructures and social practices might be reconsidered and exploited via new protocols and logics. These relational logics will be thoroughly documented and mapped via a robust set of computational tools and will be the basis for the design proposals. New York City will be a primary, though not the exclusive site under consideration and additional research will be conducted to compile robust datasets from publicly available sources to inform the development of the design proposals and to augment the intelligence of the systems under consideration. Work in the studio will concentrate on developing specific rules and models for cognition through computational research conducted primarily in Grasshopper and related plugins including Firefly, as well as in physical computing in Arduino. Projects in the studio will be conceived of as techno-ecologies: nimble and responsive to their environment, taking advantage of new and future technologies, and employing the feedback between inputs, processing, and action that are the characteristics of all cognitive systems.