It was a delight to observe a group of students who indulged their imagination and wit with such responsibility on a piece of the neglected earth’s surface which requires love.

Professor Will Alsop RA OBE

in correspondence with participants on ENIAtype Masterclass

Resonating Simulations in an Environment Designing in the environment at the breach of the ice melt when fractures reveal a topos for a contingent architecture. Advanced technologies invoke latent geometries of ancient entities in the cartographies of a geological environment of The Langdales in Cumbria, England. Splicing disparate geometries reveals a dense spatial framework of cryptic cartographies that we could adopt too design a taxonomy of resonating forms, inhabiting abandoned buildings and vagrant ecologies of temporal time frameworks. The vagrant ecologies destabilize mobility’s (vectors, bifurcations, manipulative restrictions embedded in movements of speed and acceleration) and generate various forms required for construction of the navigational geoengineering of architecture. Mobility’s going back and forth through the landscape reveal a majestic architecture through the protracted engagement of the vagrant ecologies starting with the spaces of intensity and extensity. Our engagement then moves through magnetism, electricity and finally culminating in electromagnetism and electromagnetism space as a supposedly most counter-intuitive space. Layers of mobility in buildings continually interweave through the to-ing and fro-ing between the occupant as building and the participant as user. Under certain environmental conditions fragments of the designed resonating forms can unite together forming a collective, unified entity, that displays directed intentionality by slowly moving from place to place to find energy. When those environmental conditions change, the fragments separate and resume their separate existence. The resonating forms are thus a perfect example of an assemblage, where we have something less than a rigid system or structure where all relations are internal. In the geoengineering of the new foundations of an ancient city across the moors we developed a reference system that resorted to progressive updating of the local spatial cartography available to the individual, by continuous use of indications and landmarks through the resonating forms such as wind, characteristics of the soil.  - in Design Ecologies 2.2, A Sentient Relic, 2013 Shaun Murray
Pop-upView Separately

Resonating Simulations in an Environment

Designing in the environment at the breach of the ice melt when fractures reveal a topos for a contingent architecture.

Advanced technologies invoke latent geometries of ancient entities in the cartographies of a geological environment of The Langdales in Cumbria, England. Splicing disparate geometries reveals a dense spatial framework of cryptic cartographies that we could adopt too design a taxonomy of resonating forms, inhabiting abandoned buildings and vagrant ecologies of temporal time frameworks.

The vagrant ecologies destabilize mobility’s (vectors, bifurcations, manipulative restrictions embedded in movements of speed and acceleration) and generate various forms required for construction of the navigational geoengineering of architecture. Mobility’s going back and forth through the landscape reveal a majestic architecture through the protracted engagement of the vagrant ecologies starting with the spaces of intensity and extensity. Our engagement then moves through magnetism, electricity and finally culminating in electromagnetism and electromagnetism space as a supposedly most counter-intuitive space. Layers of mobility in buildings continually interweave through the to-ing and fro-ing between the occupant as building and the participant as user.

Under certain environmental conditions fragments of the designed resonating forms can unite together forming a collective, unified entity, that displays directed intentionality by slowly moving from place to place to find energy. When those environmental conditions change, the fragments separate and resume their separate existence. The resonating forms are thus a perfect example of an assemblage, where we have something less than a rigid system or structure where all relations are internal.

In the geoengineering of the new foundations of an ancient city across the moors we developed a reference system that resorted to progressive updating of the local spatial cartography available to the individual, by continuous use of indications and landmarks through the resonating forms such as wind, characteristics of the soil. 

- in Design Ecologies 2.2, A Sentient Relic, 2013

Shaun Murray

Volatile Signalling in Fast Response Notations  A demonstration that architecture through drawing, just like bacteria and no less sentient, can engage in high-speed capture and processing of notations in actual space and decide in augmentation for architecture with precision. This is why it is important to illustrate not only why it is necessary to conceptualize through the relation of the design of buildings to the real, but also how entangled real and virtual have become – where the real can be played directly through the virtual as a strange but compelling hinge space. We need a different image of the future of architecture, one that responds to architectures actual history as a practice of twisted plotting driven by cunning ingenuity, and is as such quite different from those suggested by both the corporate visions of architecture or the easily answerable ‘questions’ of so-called ‘design for debate’. 
Pop-upView Separately

Volatile Signalling in Fast Response Notations 

A demonstration that architecture through drawing, just like bacteria and no less sentient, can engage in high-speed capture and processing of notations in actual space and decide in augmentation for architecture with precision. This is why it is important to illustrate not only why it is necessary to conceptualize through the relation of the design of buildings to the real, but also how entangled real and virtual have become – where the real can be played directly through the virtual as a strange but compelling hinge space. We need a different image of the future of architecture, one that responds to architectures actual history as a practice of twisted plotting driven by cunning ingenuity, and is as such quite different from those suggested by both the corporate visions of architecture or the easily answerable ‘questions’ of so-called ‘design for debate’. 

Many designers today are restoring an environmental perspective to usability studies, mining the history of affordances itself for new paradigms that might check the behaviorist and consumerist tendencies of their profession. “Environmental” carries here both its popular sense (“The Environment,” as if there were such a thing), while also referring to the place of an object (such as a joint stool) or a practice (such as theater) in a set of nested and overlapping systems that might include urban, agrarian, monetary, climactic, craft-based, and informational networks. (8)

(8) A journal like Design Ecologies (published by Eniatype, a group of architects based in London) looks at “the complex relationship between human activity and the environment,” examining “the totality or pattern of linkages between drawing and environment” (http://www.eniatype.com/index.php?/about-this-site/).

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed. Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects. (Oliphaunt Books | Washington, DC, 2012)
Autonomous Reflexivity are self-contained, leading directly to action and characterised by instrumental rationality. If a telluric architecture alters the environment, will it be able to be maintained by artificial sub-systems to replace the natural ones, in a way that allows technology to keep ahead of nature, until eventually architecture will be able to become completely independent of the natural order by technological means – manufacturing the collision between antagonistic forces, while inserting the division between people and environments? This could be seen as an argument for future prescription rather than analysis – an accelerator of change to other learning experiences. Shaun Murray, London 2013 in Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, published with intellect books.
Pop-upView Separately

Autonomous Reflexivity are self-contained, leading directly to action and characterised by instrumental rationality.


If a telluric architecture alters the environment, will it be able to be maintained by artificial sub-systems to replace the natural ones, in a way that allows technology to keep ahead of nature, until eventually architecture will be able to become completely independent of the natural order by technological means – manufacturing the collision between antagonistic forces, while inserting the division between people and environments? This could be seen as an argument for future prescription rather than analysis – an accelerator of change to other learning experiences.

Shaun Murray, London 2013

in Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, published with intellect books.

Meta-reflexivity critically evaluate previous inner dialogues and are critical about effective action in promoting value rational action. The architecture that we present will define the determining effects of interaction through a system of varying power, and will suggest a theoretical framework pioneering a new physical notational system that is linked organically to coding and zoning agencies in the atmosphere. Shaun Murray, London, 2013 in Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, published with intellect books.
Pop-upView Separately

Meta-reflexivity critically evaluate previous inner dialogues and are critical about effective action in promoting value rational action.


The architecture that we present will define the determining effects of interaction through a system of varying power, and will suggest a theoretical framework pioneering a new physical notational system that is linked organically to coding and zoning agencies in the atmosphere.

Shaun Murray, London, 2013

in Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, published with intellect books.

Architecture pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city where ambiguity, indifference, indetermination pours down. This is not disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into. Reflexive architecture invokes the notion of surface alterity – a reflex of something playing back onto itself. The history of architecture provides us with numerous examples of such reflexivity, among others through the styles of metareference and strange loop or tangled hierarchy that arise when, by moving only upwards or downwards through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. Reflexivity in architecture references the idea of a surface representation which may present a superficial alterity to its object but which possesses no ontological depth.  An architecture ‘consummated within the process of building, once this is liberated from all conceptual (and practical) dependency upon the ideal of the building and its redemptive finality. Rather than facilitating a sequenced project, proceeding from complete plan to finished structure, it tends to realize its own presupposition in a continuous, non-terminal and multiscaled temporality. The time of architectural realization is extracted (‘unpacked’) from the punctual moment of structural completion drawn back into design and ‘at the same time’ prolonged into the architectural afterlife of inhabitation, utilization, teleological revision and dilapidation.’ Shaun Murray, London 2013 in Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, published with intellect books.
Pop-upView Separately

Architecture pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city where ambiguity, indifference, indetermination pours down. This is not disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into.


Reflexive architecture invokes the notion of surface alterity – a reflex of something playing back onto itself. The history of architecture provides us with numerous examples of such reflexivity, among others through the styles of metareference and strange loop or tangled hierarchy that arise when, by moving only upwards or downwards through a hierarchical system, one finds oneself back where one started. Reflexivity in architecture references the idea of a surface representation which may present a superficial alterity to its object but which possesses no ontological depth.  An architecture ‘consummated within the process of building, once this is liberated from all conceptual (and practical) dependency upon the ideal of the building and its redemptive finality. Rather than facilitating a sequenced project, proceeding from complete plan to finished structure, it tends to realize its own presupposition in a continuous, non-terminal and multiscaled temporality. The time of architectural realization is extracted (‘unpacked’) from the punctual moment of structural completion drawn back into design and ‘at the same time’ prolonged into the architectural afterlife of inhabitation, utilization, teleological revision and dilapidation.’

Shaun Murray, London 2013

in Design Ecologies 2.1: the ill-defined niche, published with intellect books.

Advent of Tellurian… England as an irradiated wasteland within it lies a city… Outside the boundary walls a desert, a cursed earth, inside the wall a cursed city stretching from Brighton to Bath …. an unbroken concrete landscape… fuelled by the tellurian..80 million people living in the ruin of the relic and the sentient structures of the new one..sentient bots, sentient highways, sentient city, convulsing, joking… breaking under its own weight…weeping geology and sliding carcasses control the 14th colony.. citizens in fear of the ground… a slow environment dagger, the guns the gangs, the ground, the only thing fighting in this chaos … juries, executioners, judges “do you require back-up”….”no”
Pop-upView Separately

Advent of Tellurian… England as an irradiated wasteland within it lies a city… Outside the boundary walls a desert, a cursed earth, inside the wall a cursed city stretching from Brighton to Bath …. an unbroken concrete landscape… fuelled by the tellurian..80 million people living in the ruin of the relic and the sentient structures of the new one..sentient bots, sentient highways, sentient city, convulsing, joking… breaking under its own weight…weeping geology and sliding carcasses control the 14th colony.. citizens in fear of the ground… a slow environment dagger, the guns the gangs, the ground, the only thing fighting in this chaos … juries, executioners, judges “do you require back-up”….”no”

The weeping woman with a dagger in her eye  as if designed pieces need to breakdown quicker and collapse. Whilst sliding carcasses and rustic weather patterns control the hive of the 14th Colony… Site Constraints and Mobile Horizons weeping geology and the slow environment dagger ENIAtype Masterclass with Will Alsop RA OBE 2012-2013
Zoom Info
The weeping woman with a dagger in her eye  as if designed pieces need to breakdown quicker and collapse. Whilst sliding carcasses and rustic weather patterns control the hive of the 14th Colony… Site Constraints and Mobile Horizons weeping geology and the slow environment dagger ENIAtype Masterclass with Will Alsop RA OBE 2012-2013
Zoom Info

The weeping woman with a dagger in her eye  as if designed pieces need to breakdown quicker and collapse. Whilst sliding carcasses and rustic weather patterns control the hive of the 14th Colony…

Site Constraints and Mobile Horizons

weeping geology and the slow environment dagger

ENIAtype Masterclass

with Will Alsop RA OBE

2012-2013

Double-edge Tactile Maps and Speculative Geographies  in Plexing the Otiose Participant Shaun Murray, 2012 The creation of a mandala, as a double-edge tactile map, requires many hours and days to complete. One edge cutting through the dominant ’theory chic’ of contemporary architecture and the other opening the way for a more dangerous conception of design. Each mandala contains many notations that must be perfectly reproduced each time, to plex an otiose participant back into a contingent reality with themselves and with the ground. The image shows a participant making a mandala; as a tool for positioning themselves within.
Zoom Info
Double-edge Tactile Maps and Speculative Geographies  in Plexing the Otiose Participant Shaun Murray, 2012 The creation of a mandala, as a double-edge tactile map, requires many hours and days to complete. One edge cutting through the dominant ’theory chic’ of contemporary architecture and the other opening the way for a more dangerous conception of design. Each mandala contains many notations that must be perfectly reproduced each time, to plex an otiose participant back into a contingent reality with themselves and with the ground. The image shows a participant making a mandala; as a tool for positioning themselves within.
Zoom Info

Double-edge Tactile Maps and Speculative Geographies 

in Plexing the Otiose Participant

Shaun Murray, 2012

The creation of a mandala, as a double-edge tactile map, requires many hours and days to complete. One edge cutting through the dominant ’theory chic’ of contemporary architecture and the other opening the way for a more dangerous conception of design.

Each mandala contains many notations that must be perfectly reproduced each time, to plex an otiose participant back into a contingent reality with themselves and with the ground. The image shows a participant making a mandala; as a tool for positioning themselves within.

Top