This project will explore the desolution of tectonic hierarchies through the development of behavioral design methodologies based on swarm or multi-agent techniques. The relation ship between structure and ornament will be interrogated and rethought through non-linear design tools.

The re-conceptualization of the agency of matter through an understanding of swarm logic necessarily resituates design intent from operating at the global to local level. The posited application of swarm systems within architectural design involves encoding simple architectural decisions within a distributed system of autonomous computational entities-agents. It’s the interaction of these local decisions that self-organizes design intention, giving rise to a form of collective intelligence and emergent behavior at the global scale.

The repositioning of the design intent and the complex order generated by the behavioral techniques of multi-agent systems has implications for the affects which are generated as well as the nature of hierarchy within architecture. The distributed non-linear operation of swarm systems intrinsically resists the discrete articulation of hierarchies within Modern architecture and contemporary parametric component assemblies.

The bottom up nature of these systems refocuses tectonic concerns on the assemblage at he micro scale rather than the sequential subdivision of program or form.

The premise of the project rejects modernist tectonics (including mass standardization) and contemporary parametric component assemblies (mass customization). Instead we will look for an alternative organization of matter that draws from an understanding of micro-structure such as those found in butterfly wing; where color and pattern are determined through the organization of matter as a geometrical configuration rather than through chemical attributes such as pigmentation.