Kinda want to see if it makes more sense for video game levels, which often times make no sense.
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As always, ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the New Aesthetic.
That and (seriously) toilet usage.
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Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.
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My high school (Cholla High in Tucson) was built in 1970 and features hexagonal pods as shown here. But they separated the pods, so that each classroom could have a few windows.
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Not if you let the computer design furniture optimized for each room! Utopia is just around the corner.
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"Hi. I’m new. Could you tell me how to get to Mr. Peterson’s classroom?”
"Uhm, that depends. Are you familiar with graph theory?”
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Next, we optimise basketball.
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Traditional schools resemble prisons.
These schools resemble brains.
Impractical, yes – but also beautiful.
Why does everything hinge on practicality? Can’t we have nice things that are impractical, but worth it because they are nice?
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Please don’t put libraries next to cafeterias.
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The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc.
“Constructability.” Pikers. My artificial intelligence routine produces floorplans without regard for all of physics. If they were actually assembled, a student walking from the flagpole to the library would be turned inside out and ejected at half the speed of light through his own asshole.
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I suspect that if any of us was stuck working every day in an environment that was utterly impractical, the “nice” would wear off pretty quickly.
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Also, it depends on what you mean by “we”. You want an impractical but nice layout for the home or business you own? By all means go for it. Should we force people to pay taxes for an impractical school layout, and force teachers and students to spend all day there? Not so much.
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What is this. A SCHOOL FOR ANTS?
*sad no one referenced this already
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Add the fact that, in the original design, many of these classrooms would likely benefitted from the natural light provided by facing windows. A lot of the classrooms in the AI floorplan are going to feel like cells (unless you put skylights in, and then probably, more leaks).
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In the early 1970s, there was a lot of work on computer assisted architecture. Nicholas Negroponte, among others, developed systems for constraint management, urban planning and architectural design. Many of them were interactive. You’d set up the problem, define the spaces needed, their constraints and then manipulate the spaces, dragging them around and reshaping them with a constant read out of various metrics. The spaces were generally rectangular. Many of the systems had various solution assistants. Some used graph theory and applied iterative improvements. Some iterated while you interacted, so you’d pull a space one way and it would fight you if it wanted to be somewhere else.
Another approach, developed in the Netherlands, was grammatical. It was a lot like what Conway and Mead later developed with systematic design rules and structural libraries. The SAR design methodology was originally for pencil and paper, but it computerized well, and I remember some interesting thesis projects including one parsing the interior layouts in a subsidized housing project. The typical design flowed from the placement of the cable television hookup.
Neither of these approaches got a lot of traction. It would be years before most architects and city planners would start working with computers. It’s interesting to see a bit of a revival. Has it really been 45 years? Note also the return of hexagonal design, something more from the 1960s than 1970s. I had an aunt and uncle who lived in a hexagonal condominium complex in Miami Beach back then. A lot of architects and architectural critics were not fond of computerized design back then. They felt it would lead to “glandular” architecture with oddly shaped buildings and internal spaces. Anyone looking at a modern skyline can see that they were right. Buildings aren’t just boxes anymore.
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Uh… the computer optimizations look like a complete failure in regards to fire exits. Assuming the existing plan each class room has it’s own exit/entrance (my gradeschool class rooms certainly did).
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I was trying to work out what “optimized for minimizing fire escape paths” meant- because it looks like the idea was to make them smaller, not more useful.
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I eventually decided they meant “shorter distance to fire exit”, but it confused me at first, too.
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