(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

This paper will explore a set of techniques for the identification and transformation of information embedded within existing built environments through studio-based design pedagogy and built outcomes. This projective typological approach emphasises the value of the intelligence of a given built environment as the source material for new design works to be inserted within them. This approach seeks ongoing availability to users of programmatic, semantic, cultural and other shared knowledge that is encoded within existing built environments. The research articulates a distinction between urban ‘data’ manifested within a particular place and typological ‘information’ identifiable through the examination of multiple objects or environments of the same type. Many earlier investigations into type, typology and information within cities sought to revive or sustain identified historic materials, patterns or forms in architecture and urbanism. Christopher Alexander’s ‘A Pattern Language’ (1977) presents such an argument, while Aldo Rossi’s ‘Architecture of the City’ (1966) present a different, but related argument for the retention of the knowledge of the built environment, in opposition to the then contemporary modernist focus on the new and resultant erasure of memory in cities. The focus in this work on the maintenance or restoration of historic forms of urban environments, arguably led to a bias for traditional design processes and construction methodologies in this and subsequent related work. The work presented in this paper engages with notions of sustaining the intelligence of existing built environment, however applies this sensibility through computational design processes and the development of new digital fabrication techniques for transforming this typological knowledge into new forms during a period of accelerating change in what we require of our buildings and the way in which they are realised.