VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought

Abstract

The specific things governing authorities choose to regulate—and the methods they use to evaluate compliance—tell a (partial but authorized) story about what we, as a society, collectively value. In architecture, regulatory compliance hurdles inscribe bare-minimum standards of acceptability, beyond which practitioners are free to exercise design intent. But as the space between bare-minimum compliance and design intent collapses under the weight of increasing design automation and aggressive cost management, the regulation is now an urgent site of creative provocation—and a necessary pedagogical material. Accordingly, Regulatory Nonsense was a graduate-level architecture studio that ran in an accredited Australian Master of Architecture program across eight consecutive semesters from 2020-23. In Regulatory Nonsense, students explored how the (constitutive, prescriptive, and performance-based) linguistic conventions of contemporary regulation can open up or foreclose possibilities for architecture. We wondered: What might the world be like if building and planning regulations were co-written by (a glitchy artificial amalgamation of) poets, storytellers, artists, and philosophers? Together, we iteratively wrote and rewrote building and planning codes, standards, statutes, policies, guidelines, legislation, and regulations using glitchy natural language processing artificial intelligence bots trained with their own bespoke datasets of poetry, fiction, and descriptive prose. Students then used architectural design to test the effectiveness, limitations, and possibilities of these new (nonsensical, poetic, ambiguous, linguistically thick) regulations. Along the way, students were encouraged to toggle back-and-forth between the reciprocal roles of policymaker and architect, juggling the demands of rulemaking (for all, for others) alongside (their own) design intent.