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• Hyperbody TU Delft

The Workshop BCN Formula was held from 10 January to 15 March 2003 at the ESARQ in Barcelona. The 10 week workshop was a cooperation between the ESARQ, the ONL office and the Hyperbody Research Group.

BCN formula is a planning tool in the form of an operational multi-player game, that generates building proposals for Barcelona in real-time. The existing city is modelled as a two-plus-eleven-dimensional grid that processes its internal states like a cellular automat, and can be externally influenced by the users through urban interventions. These interventions change the position of blocks within the eleven urban dimensions of Barcelona defined by ESARQ students. The dimensions are capturing the swarming life, traffic, and commercial activities enfolding in the existing Barcelona grid. The grid influences the movement of a swarming point cloud. As soon the point cloud reaches critical mass, it generates a sculptural structure informed by the multi-dimensional procedural model of the city. ESARQ students provided feedback to the process by interpreting the structures as buildings in urban contexts, which are placed by the point cloud at locations that fit the criteria. Parallel to the excisting grid, a seducing city comes to flourish, respecting the old rationalist city grid but refraining from any mimicry. The new parallel city of Barcelona co-exists with the existing one.

Here, city planning is not thought of as a top-down pressure but as a strategy for evolving existing social structures. The workshop participants described the genetic codes of the Barcelona Grid and the Barcelona feeling and atmosphere. The students were asked to design flowcharts diagramming the city as an input > processing > output device. The students learned how to work with the game development programme Virtools, which was then used to build the multi-player planning game. Playing the planning game produces the data [in realtime], which are used for the design of the buildings from the parallel world. Procedures include intuive acts.

The resulting structures are blobs, in that they are double-curved, twisted, seemingly irrational and not geometrically derivable structures. Yet such blobs they are only to those who do not know the genetic code and the procedures that generated these highly informed, context-related building structures.

Date: 2003

Site: Barcelona, Spain

Project architect: Prof ir Kas Oosterhuis

Design team tutors: Kas Oosterhuis, Ilona Lénárd, Michael Bittermann, Chris Kievid, Christian Friedrich, Jasper Eustace

Design team students: Alberto Sarasa, Cecilia Morales, Rita Gonzales, Jaume Canals, Luis Darias, Toni Rubio, Sergio de Felix, Sebastian Martorell Mateo, Tobias Garcia Belmonte, Ventura Ramio

Client: ESARQ University Barcelona