Blurred Bodies

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RESEARCH BACKGROUND: Blurred Bodies is a prototype developed for the international Field Constructs Design Competition, which invited emerging designers, architects, landscape architects, and artists to create a temporary outdoor installation for exhibition at the Circle Acres Nature Preserve in Austin, Texas. Blurred Bodies hovers between the natural and the artificial. It shifts between camouflaging with its environment and reveling in its alienation. It is an experiment that is intended to be inhabited, or at least navigated. It sits between an installation and a pavilion, with ambitions of being proto-architectural. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The project was designed using behavioral-based algorithms in which a turbulent surface emerges from a swarm of agentBODIES. This process imbues the project with a natural or swarmlike character. While sculptural in nature, it is fundamentally an architectural prototype. It is part of an ongoing exploration into the synthesis of surface, structure, and ornament through complex systems. The work is part of Snooks' ongoing interest in developing a behavioural approach to architectural design that draws from the logic of swarm intelligence and draws on a new architectural paradigm developed out of complexity theory, computation and a focus on emergent phenomena. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: Out of the 82 total entries, 18 finalists were selected, with 4 winners subsequently awarded $5,000 to be used toward the realization of the project. The jury comprised of leading figures in architecture, design and art. The completed installations opened to the public at Circle Acres for a public event, which promoted design and community programming at the site. A concurrent exhibition showcasing the 18 finalist entries was held at the University of Texas at Austin (13-23 November 2015). The event and project were reviewed by Bustler, The Architect's Newspaper, Architectural Digest and Tribeza (Texas).