Cliff House

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'Cliff House', a speculative project made in collaboration with Mitchell Lab (Texas A&M), was designed and fabricated in Nevada, USA in 2012 by a team of designers and fabricators. Roland Snooks was design director. The House is part of Snooks' larger research trajectory to develop and articulate a behavioural approach to architectural design that draws from the logic of swarm intelligence and operates through multi-agent algorithms. This work is part of the architectural paradigm that has developed out of complexity theory, computation and a focus on emergent phenomena. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: 'Cliff House' explores the structural and architectural capacities of composite fiber construction in an extreme condition - cantilevered from the side of a cliff. The project also tests the design methodology of 'Messy computation' which looks at the feedback between bottom-up algorithmic processes and top-down modeling techniques. This strategy negotiates between intuition or design judgment regarding the macro-scale with systemic digital processes that operate at the micro-scale. The project is also part of an ongoing series of projects that deal with poly-scalar tectonics - geometries or generative operations that operate at multiple scales acting to blur the boundaries between architectural elements (form/structure/ornament) which are typically tied to specific scale relations. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: 'The Cliff House' was published in 'The Age' and 'SMH' as part of a major feature article on 'Ideas that could change your life' (22 March 2013). The article used Cliff House to demonstrate a future application of composite materials and robotic fabrication. It discussed Snooks' ideas about new efficient lightweight structures (using algorithms from natural systems) that can be built where it was not previously feasible (sheer cliffs, floating on the sea).