The open columns’ homeostat is a self organizing environment for exploring durational spatial configurations. It is a scaled performative model (1”= 1’-0”) that sets up an array of columns whose patterned deployment reconfigures the space beneath them. It was conceptually inspired by Ashby’s legendary cybernetic machine, the Homeostat, and Pask’s interactive environment, the Colloquy of Mobiles. Like the former, it is a demonstrative model of an idea, in this case a means to study an evolving environment based on different heuristics. Like the latter, it imagines a space of interaction between people and their environment where the architecture has subjectivity and can adapt to changing conditions.

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The genesis of this research comes out of an interest in self-organizing systems, which exhibit phenomena of nonlinearity, instability and adaptability. Ilya Prigogine describes physico-chemical “dissipative systems”, like thermal convection and the Belouzsov-Zhabotinski (BZ) reaction, which exhibit complex self-organizing behaviors in far from equilibrium states. These behaviors are not deterministic and can yield several responses under the same conditions. The cause for this variety lays in the system’s past- some historical event that whose effects can emerge unexpectedly at a later stage in the system’s evolution. These qualities are potentially useful for an architecture that has to respond to changing needs from its occupants and environmental conditions.

 open columns digital walkthrough