A rather 'fast' project, for the st louis follies competition (http://www.stlfollies.com/index.html) developed with Katerina Tryfonidou.

The competition was a call for installations (for downtown St. Louis) that were supposed to host art exhibitions. Our proposal had to do with the idea of a growing organism that takes over city spaces. Close to the idea of the follies, since there is no specific need for the creation of the organism, the idea of a parasite that uses existing city structures in order to be developed is by no means new to architecture (urbican fever is a very interesting illustration of that ‘architect’s dream’). What makes that idea rather important today though, is that trough scripting we are becoming able to create self-referential organisms that are actually following growth patterns (the L-systems are a good example). In urbican fever the architect is finding that cubic device, he brings it to the city, and then the device starts growing according to its own logic, without the architect being able to intervene. It is a totally ‘interior to the device’ logic that is responsible for the growing pattern. Similarly in the various experiments taking place today with L-systems, cellular automata etc, the architect is in a similar position: He defines the initial rules, the first generation, and then he can only stay back and watch the growing process, which he is rather unable to predict in the first place. And that’s where the whole thing becomes so interesting.

Our project is a rather primitive attempt. A simple honeycomb structure is growing and changes colors, according to the game of life set of rules. Only that the automaton is not totally an ‘automaton’, that is people by entering the structure, can change the state of a cell and therefore affect the whole process. Well, a theme that has to be developed more in the future….

more here