The Parametric Urban Landscape Lab

PUL L  2020


Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
Arch. Natanel Elfassy 
Arch. Roy Tamir

Microsoft, The Garage – Israel
Guy Shalev


What is PUL L ?

As a dynamic learning environment, The Parametric Urban Landscape Lab (PUL L) give the next generation of architects the space to imagine, test and shape the future of cities, architecture and technology through applied research, learning by doing, and implementing global agendas developed through local solutions. In a world where radical advances in technology are taken for granted, PULL researchers practice technologies enabling to create a better future.
PULL provides attendees with a cross-disciplinary culture of computational design and a comprehensive knowledge of cutting-edge technologies in the fields of parametric architecture, robotics, digital manufacturing and 3D printing for the construction industry.

PULL program is designed for a selected students and offers a variety of courses, fabrication and prototyping workshops, conferences, digital talks and events.


Participants

Thesis projects  (5th year)

Meitar Keshet
Martin Bukstein
GabI Nicola
Gilad Kweller
Meirav Dadash‏
Leora Niderberg
Larisa Reismann
Libat Eden
Kevin +
Yarden Shoham
Itzik Ohayon
Yarden Dayan
Ariel Sher
Amir Avraham
Hila Sharabi
Tor Altaras
Fall Semester
(4th year)

Lea Marques
Ilanit Gottlieb
Kertu Johanna Joeste
Pia Elena Frey
Kaja Boudewijn
Spring Semester (4th year)


Education Fabrication Research Outreach


Education,
The Lab is a distributed educational model aiming to introduce digital fabrication and design methods through workshops and the short programs. Operated using non-hierarchical methodologies that placed students and educators on the same plane. Cultivating creative thinking within all fields.

Fabrication,
Advanced digital production laboratory, digital fabrication laboratory geared towards self sufficiency, where you can build almost anything. in collaboration with worldwide leaders of the Digital Fabrication Revolution.

Research,
Developed in collaboration with public and private partners, oriented towards exploring the role of technology in our societies and cities, and making sense of it.

Outreach,
Through lectures, publications, exhibitions and competition. to promotes our values in the discussion about architecture, cities, society and technology, nowadays facing worldwide challenges.



Strengths


Non Standard,
The digital revolution is changing our way of using and thinking about objects and spaces: enter the world of non-standard design and evolutive architecture.

Trans-disciplinary,
Learn how to use computation and data to drive your design in architecture, urbanism, engineering and the digital arts.

Learn By Doing,
An augmented learning process based on ongoing alternation between theory, design applications and prototyping.

Network Thinking,
A real opportunity to enter a ecosystem of architectural innovation. Embrace collaborative cultures and join an international network of architectural innovation.



Objectives


1. Providing participants with a solid knowledge of innovative digital cultures and computational tools based on both technical skills and artistic sensibility.

2. Providing participants a broad set of expertise to take advantage of new technologies in manufacturing and digital fabrication (CNC prototyping, 3D printing, industrial fabrication, aerial robotics, etc.).

3. Encouraging a process-oriented approach to design based on theory of genetic optimisation and the use of environnemental data in architecture.

At the end of the training, graduates will


1. Have the know-how to innovate their design workflow using a computational and collaborative approach towards architecture and engineering.

2. Have a complete understanding of tools for digital design and robotic manufacturing

3. Design, manage and build non-standard objects and complex geometries


Challenge 

PULL challenge the role of the architect in contemporary society. With the help of historical, geographical, and speculative strategies, We will challenge ways of working, thinking, and relating to one another in a given society. Complicating the divisive categories used to manage the assemblages of habit and settlement that we call societies, PULL redefines the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical invasions, the interface of conceptual and scientific languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions.

The proposed architectural experiments focuses in looking at the big challenges faced by humanity today through the lens of critical design, social innovation and advanced technologies, such as augmented reality, digital fabrication, machine learning, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, self-assembled materials and more…

In the framework of PUL L, we put the spotlight on the question of energy, the connection to nature and the city in which spatial dynamics are inseparable from the effects of climate change, landscape and infrastructure, ecology of ecosystems, the disruption of residential systems, the challenges of current work patterns and the changing transformations of urban mobility.


Computation

Computer-based processes drive and guide the planning and design processes. New planning environments enable new and challenging thinking in every aspect of traditional architecture, ranging from sketches and mappings through materiality and form search, to construction and construction methods on site. These are the new environments in which we are required to plan today, and this is the basis of parametric thinking.


The City as Urban Landscape

PUL L investigates the processes of urbanization in a global and local context. Examining sites that face broad structural and social changes. Following the 2011 Historic Landscape Recommendation by UNESCO – an approach to urban interventions that shifted the focus from ‘monuments’, namely objects and elements, to ‘landscapes’, namely systems and processes. The field of research moves beyond the heritage of traditional urban planning, characterised by binary definitions between city and margins, city and suburb, etc. Instead, it is the parametric urban landscape that is examined as a changing complexity of artificial and natural social and economic systems. PUL L questions static and materialistic approaches to urban heritage, assigning equal emphasis on both tangible and intangible assets and values and considering wider natural and artificial (manmade) environment where layers of the historic and contemporary city (social, economic, cultural, industrial, infrastructural, environmental etc) take shape and develop over time in constant negotiations, interaction and conflict.

We ask, can we imagine other ways in which things could be done, thought, or produced in the future ?


Non Standard

PUL L 2020 will focus on critical design and social innovation through advanced technologies, such as digital fabrication, machine learning, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, self-assembled materials and more.

An important emphasis will be placed in the unit and in the supporting courses on professionalisation and improvement of the student's toolbox.

The participants will learn and practice tools such as parametric softwares, digital production and design, robotics, smart geometries, virtual and augmented reality, simulation software, mapping, energy and climate, animation software and advanced rendering software. So that a significant body of knowledge will be created among the participants, for a critical, historical and practical understanding of the parametric planning world toward an architecture non-standard.

The studio's products will range from urban to living-unit scale and will deal with the complexity of the growing spatial, dynamic, information-flow, technology, and ever-changing social / economic relationships in real time. By producing information in parametric systems, we can begin to produce reflexive, flexible, complex, variable and dynamic systems that can create new living environments relevant to the 21st century.



Programme:


DATA ANALYSIS

Agent Based Tectonics for Architecture
Smart Cities and Collective Intelligence
Artificial intelligent and Machine Learning
Machine Vision
Genetic and Evolutionary design
Data Viz



ENERGY DESIGN

Environnemental Design
Adaptive materials
Resoponsive and Interactive design
Drones and Aerial Robotics
Optimization



ADVANCED GEOMETRY

Management and Design of Complex Geometries
Conceptual Structural Design
Algorithmic Optimization
Performance-driven Design Robotics and Industrial Fabrication
3D/4D Printing and Material Science
Digital Prototyping and Final Project Fabrication
Advanced Mesh Modelling and Data Bodies