Anastasia Whitehead

Within us all is a desire to understand, compare, categorise and control everything around us – this is our curiosity.

On the 4th October 1957, human curiosity launched us into outer space. Faced with the unknown, space agencies generated manuals of code, instructing a decorum of actions to instil procedures. These manuals were the first of their kind – a manual to the decorums of space.

On Earth, throughout all time, code has been and is ubiquitous. It is genetics, patterns in nature, codified behaviours, rules of education, laws in cities and predictions of the weather. Code is invisibly ingrained into every aspect of our lives.

In this modern time, we follow an unspoken language of understanding, acting within the set rules of our decorum. We have become variables within a computer; rationalised, predictable patterns, translated into codes. We follow rules, rules which govern the way we use space, rules that command the way we create space. Architecture is no longer curious – it has become predictable, rationalised, controlled. 

What would a curious architecture be? 

An architecture that uses rules, in a way they were not intended. 

An architecture created through understanding, comparison, categorisation and control.

Architecture Automaton defines its own ‘creational rules’ taking an abstracted approach to code – challenging the intentions of geometric, duration and dimensional rules. 

Originating at the manual of decorum, ‘cloister-ness’ is created from the translation of decorum through visual, automaton and categorical codes. Pixel clusters are read as aspects of the plan – scale, duration, circulation, material and threshold. Architecture Automaton generates a new form created through the unseen codes that dictate how space is used.