Crisis Fronts is the Degree Project studio and seminar run by Michael Chen and Jason Lee, with Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

Crisis Fronts is an ongoing inquiry into contemporary global crises that suggest new demands and agendas for architecture, and the potential afforded by parametric and generative digital design tools to engage them.

Download the complete 2008-2009 Crisis Fronts syllabus

Download the general Degree Projects syllabus

CRISIS FRONTS :: Cognitive Infrastructures 

2008 marks an important milestone as the year when for the first time in history the majority of the world’s population will reside in urban areas. An explosion in urban growth is underway, most notably in the developing world where the urban population is expected to double by 2030.

Cities are already the sites of rapid cultural change and they are the primary economic and cultural engines of societies. An increasingly globalized and urban world is at once inevitable and it is also necessary. This urban world produces its own forms of diversity, innovation, and intelligence, but the unprecedented growth of cities worldwide is not without challenges. The extraordinary scale and speed of urban growth already exceeds the capacity of the systems that would service, support, and manage it. Much of this growth will take place beyond the legal and administrative boundary of the city proper, uninhibited by centralized planning or management, and in absence of an adequate set of municipal infrastructures.

The decentralized growth of the city – that which takes place in patches, on the periphery, self- regulated, and remote from central administrative control – is the site of extraordinary volatility and undergoes a constant process of transformation. Current forms of infrastructure are outdated before they are even completed and remain fixed in the scale and possess neither the speed nor the flexibility and responsiveness that would enable feedback between them and the growth of the city. They are no longer adequate. The failure of infrastructure will be an enormous factor in the increase of worldwide poverty, hunger, disease, overcrowding, and instability. New, more intelligent infrastructures and new understandings and readings of urban infrastructures will have to be invented – ones that have the potential to engage changing forms of organization, operative processes, and generative logics found in the contemporary city.

Of particular relevance are the areas of the city that are the fastest growing, the most contested, the most fragile, and the least served by conventional infrastructures like energy, clean water, and transportation. These are areas that grow following logics of extreme pragmatism and efficiency on a granular level, that are self organizing and self regulating, and that will require new tools and systems of intelligence to comprehend and negotiate. At issue is the development of a fundamentally different view of infrastructure, but also of systems of intelligence, memory and cognition.

Cognition refers not only to the acquisition of information and data, but to its processing, and its culmination in action. Research in the studio will focus on the underlying structure or logic that enables cognition and also on approaches to introduce new forms of cognition into the city.

Cognitive Infrastructures are poly-scalar, working across intensity, quality, and a range of relationships that exist at the scale of architectural components and assemblies at one extreme and urban and infrastructural scales and effects at another. They are dynamic formations of data, material, and services. They include physical formations and also practices that acquire an infrastructural scale. They are organizational and responsive, and must be engaged in continual feedback with their environments.

Work in the studio will concentrate on developing specific rules and models for cognition through computational research in Rhinoscript. Projects in the studio will be conceived of not as envelopes or scaffolds, but as cognitive techno-ecologies: nimble and responsive to their environment, taking advantage of new and future technologies, and employing the feedback between inputs, processing, and action that are the characteristics of all cognitive systems. They seek to identify and actively augment the performance of the opportunistic programs and patterns of use that will emerge around them. These patterns are understood to comprise a complex social feedback system and will afford the opportunity for speculation on new forms of material intelligence, formal innovation, new social practices, institutions, leisure, commerce, and piracy.