 
Antonino Saggio I Quaderni
Alea Iacta Est ! New Bodies for Architecture
Preface by Antonino Saggio
To The Book written Kas Oosterhuis Towards a New Kind of Architecture, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam 2011
Kas Oosterhuis is one of the few architects in the world who has "crossed the Rubicon." For Kas, the die has been cast, and work must be made Towards a New Kind of Building. Oosterhuis has built a solid outpost, expressive and credible, on the far shore of a radically new architecture. This position constitutes a benchmark for all those who currently believe in the need for a revolution linked with the affirmation of the IT paradigm. At the same time, his work is also a reference point for all of contemporary architecture.
What are the key elements of this position?
The first component is the presence of a series of actually constructed works that concretely demonstrate these new principles. These include historically significant buildings such as the 1997 Saltwater Pavilion inat Neeltje Jans, Holland (one of the first interactive buildings in the world), the Garbage Transfer Station in Zenderen, or the Web of North-Holland pavilion. But one of these major works stands out as a real masterpiece of recent architecture: the Cockpit in Acoustic Barrier, an infrastructural system that acts as an acoustic barrier then transforms as it progresses to become a real building.
This sound absorbing structure is defined as it shifts and changes across the landscape and performs more than one function: an acoustic infrastructure, protection from wind, a potential solar collector and environmental purification system, and finally an actual building. By recoiling and folding in on itself, the barrier also creates the environments for an elegant automobile showroom with a garage annex, and then rolls out to once again become a screen and acoustic barrier. This construction gives a new vision of a series of themes permeating all architectural research over the past few years. This is clear proof that even those who do not truly believe in the ideas of Oosterhuis, cannot disregard the architectural value this work has achieved.
But the ability to put major buildings on the field is only the first of the components in Oosterhuis's position. The second component is the university research he carries out at the Hyperbody Institute he founded in 2000 at the Delft University of Technology. This institute performs research, builds prototypes, publishes reviews, organizes conferences, and involves teachers and doctoral students in the more complex aspects of theoretical research, as well as hundreds of students in education. All this happens at the gates of Rotterdam, a city well known for its architectural vitality, and home to the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), one of the pulsating centers for the promotion and diffusion of architectural culture worldwide.
In addition to this university research, the third component is naturally the ONL sStudio founded with his wife Ilona Lénáàrd, an integral part of an extremely close-knit, wonderfully cooperative association with Kas. Ilona's work constantly energizes the relationship between professional development and artistic research. The challenges of active design are handled with such power of persuasion as to lead across to this far shore consultants, technology suppliers, and above all clients who, along with collaborators, are guided by Oosterhuis and Lénáàrd into a new concept of building to face and resolve practically, and frequently ingeniously, all aspects connected with an architecture radically different than the traditional.
So what has been missing in this position? What has been lacking is a book that would be the synthesis, the promise, and above all the perspective of this approach. And this has finally arrived; you are holding it: Towards a New TypeKind of Building. As you may know, over the past few years Oosterhuis has actually done quite a bit of writing, including elegant and perfectly illustrated volumes of his works, as well as collections of articles and essays, miscellaneous substantial volumes on conferences he has organized, and books with a theoretical theme such as Hyperbodies in the IT Revolution in Architecture book series.
But the book you have here is at a much higher level than this earlier work, and holds great interest in the structure, information, and examples of many buildings, prototypes, and projects created by ONL or other designers. In fact, the original and particularly successful aspect of this work lies in the interplay between theory, design, and concrete examples.
Written by Oosterhuis, this book is organized into four large sections that use the analogy of the body to help understand the new architecture. The first section is called "Tag that Body. " What does this mean? This means that all the components of a building can potentially be tagged; i.e., they are recognizable parts of the system. Consider actually incorporating RFIDs (Radio Frequency IDentifications), already quite inexpensive, into the various components of a building. In this arrangement, the components become identifiable, nameable, personalizable, each different and above all activatable as if each were an actual being. What is the potential behavior of this tagged-body-building? First and foremost, it is to move in a swarm; i.e., the various parts share several rules with their neighbors and have local micro-behaviors and macro group behaviors! You might say, ³This is crazy!² But remember the first lines of this Introduction. This approach is no mere futuristic theory; ONL actually creates and builds these things.
The second large section of this book is called ³Shape that Body² and describes how this new type of building is logically designed, the rules it follows, and forms it can logically take. A series of fundamental ideas for Oosterhuis come into play in this section. For example, ³one building, one single detail,² or the lengthened development of structures that have a head and a tail to manage a series of inputs and outputs, or a series of analogies with the design and construction of cars.
The third part is called " Move that Body " and more fully develops the fundamental idea connected with the principle of interactivity; i.e., the fact that the building is constantly reconfigurable, a "physical " re-configurability in Oosterhuis. In other words, the building actually moves in order to change with the modification of functional, environmental and contextual conditions, and finally to experience the general condition of desire as a field that brings architecture into the dynamic, living world of plants and animals, rather than the static world of stone.
The fourth section, "Evolve that Body," instead deals with the lines of development and reasoning anticipated by this new type of building, which may incorporate new technological advances on the verge of breaking into the world of construction. Consider the use in construction of nano-technologies, File-to-Factory or Computer Numeric Control; Kas feels these are all part of a reality already widely tested, but they have yet to generally permeate the work of design and production.
In this last section, the author brings to life his way of thinking and, of great interest for the reader, explicitly attacks other architectural positions; some of these positions are in his field of IT research (for example, his approach is quite distant from an idea of " Blog Architecture, " and is naturally closer to the work of architects like Marcos Novak, Patrick Schumacher, or Makoto Sei Watanabe), and some positions in post-constructive architecture, particularly the opinions of Koolhaas from whom he clearly distances himself. In short, Kas uses these differences to show us he is already, as we said at the beginning, on the far shore of a new idea in architecture. He writes:
" My personal design universe consists of interacting populations of groups of points in space, wireless connected by force fields, aware of themselves, communicating with their immediate neighbors. My design universe consists of interacting point clouds, where each point thinks it is the center of the world, while in fact it is somewhere, just like our Earth is just somewhere in the Milky Way. Each point is an actor, always busy measuring and adjusting its position in relation to its peers. Each point is an actuator, triggering the execution of its internal program. Each point is an IPO, a receiver, processor and sender in one. Each point of my personal design point cloud displays behavior, it has character, it has style. Each point of the point cloud is a microscopic instrument to be played, a game to be unfolded. "
The final part of this book provides a place for reflections on quantum mechanics, connected with a series of studies, lectures, and research projects. The quantum world proceeds by leaps and bounds and not slow transformations, a world where opposite positions co-exist along with a method of studying phenomena in a manner extremely close to the non-pre-established organization of every living being, since it is in fact probabilistic. At this point, it is clear why quantum theory greatly involves the new type of architecture being constructed by Kas Oosterhuis and thus postulates the construction of a Quantum BIM (i.e., a Building Information Model "dealing with the principles of uncertainty and unpredictability").
I am particularly interested in discussing the point in which the author of a book dedicated to the application of quantum mechanics to Urban Design - "Quantum City" by Ayssar Arida describes two ways of concretely applying quantum theory (or in reality any other scientific theory) to the field of design. One is by way of modeling; the other is via metaphorization. Naturally Kas, also a builder and an architect extremely attentive to the concrete resolution of the interactive system of components he designs, has a great suspicion of any vague ideas of metaphorization (i.e., the use of a scientific theory as a "generic" form of inspiration). Kas clearly works, and continues to work, to produce real "modeling," i.e., the mathematical extrapolation of several fundamental connections between quantum mechanics and his Hyperbodies (that is then a method of describing this new type of building, but you already understand this). In his book, Arida presents both ways, but then in one step (p. 119) realizes one fundamental characteristic. Quantum theory, as opposed to other scientific theories, shares several principles with the metaphor itself. In particular the principle of complementarity; i.e., "both/and" logic exists in quantum theory. In other words, elements can be modified by evolving in one direction or another. This observation (it is not further developed in Arida's book), yet is instead a crucial question for us.
Let's try and understand. From the beginning of the IT Revolution in Architecture series, the role of metaphor in creating a new generation of architecture is seen as one of the driving engines of a new architecture. In 1998 (in Hyperarchitettura, the afterword to the first book in the series) I wrote:
"Can we develop an architecture that is not only metaphorical, but also a 'creator of metaphors,' that leaves its own decodification open, free, structured/non-structured, and suggests and presents the user with the possibility of 'making his own story?'
In other words, the real end of the new architecture is not only first level metaphorization (a museum that recalls the presence of a ship for example), but that of a second, higher level. Shouldn't we be able not only to imagine a fluid, metaphorical, open architecture that plays off skins as new, immaterial sensors, that encompasses and treasures a multimediality that pushes into systems of control and information, but is above all capable of generating and causing to be generated other metaphors, one with a decodification not rigidly pre-set but 'probabilistically' open? Can we not work with this ambitious and difficult idea as a frontier in our efforts? "
At this point readers will say to themselves, the writer of this preface (along with Kas) is crazy! What have second level metaphors, quantum theory, and the directions of new architecture got to do with each other? But if you consider it, you will understand. The entire construction of classic science was deterministic, absolute, cause and effect. Quantum mechanics is instead "probabilistic." As in real life itself, there is a lower or higher probability that any event will happen. In life, not in plants and even less in animals, no event is given as certain, but only as a probability. So in the field of aesthetic and poetic knowledge, the metaphor answers to the same probabilistic rule! A metaphor narrows, directs a way of looking or doing or interpreting, never deterministically closes, but only narrows, accelerates the field of convergences. In other words, works like a swarm that goes in one direction, not an assembly line or military march.
The relationship between quantum thought applied to the architecture and work of Kas Oosterhuis, who theorizes, designs, and teaches how to create this new architecture, in the end introduces a new unforeseen direction and a new higher level. Quantum mechanics shares the same basic characteristics of the metaphor. The metaphor is quantum, and therefore quantum theory (i.e., one of the most important scientific theories whose potential has yet to be completely explored), also explains the existence of a divergent thought, unexpected, in the minority, the thought of aesthetic knowledge.
Art at this point could be seen, like probability, non-predominant, but when it happens it reveals a new path, the path that discovers something new by going off course! Metaphor, quantum, and art share the risk, the possibility, the coincidences that are the stuff of life.
So "Evolve that Body," you, the reader! With Kas, and his tools, his prototypes, his ideas, his pieces of software, his brilliant intuition on how to build and create this new architecture. You, the reader, architects and designers, must also experience this new direction. A solid outpost already exists for this adventure, but the territory has yet to be explored. It may be daunting and full of pitfalls, but this is the lLand of the future
Antonino Saggio
Published in: Kas Oosterhuis, Towards a New Kind of Architecture, Nai Publishers Nai Rooerdam 2011 pp. 7-11
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