Kokkugia

Kokkugia is an experimental architecture research practice exploring generative design methodologies developed from the complex self-organising behavior of biological,social and material systems. It is a networked practice, led by Roland Snooks and Robert Stuart-Smith, with offices in Melbourne and London, operating through design, research and teaching. Kokkugia’s work has been published extensively and exhibited internationally, including in New York, London, Paris, Melbourne, Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow, Kiev, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Kokkugia were named the Australian Curators for the 2008 and 2010 Beijing Biennials. The directors of Kokkugia have taught at numerous architecture schools including: AA School of Architecture DRL, Columbia GSAPP, uPenn, SCI-Arc, UCLA, Pratt, USC, UEL, and RMIT. DESIGN STATEMENT Kokkugia’s agenda is to develop a non-linear architecture, one that emerges from the operation of complex systems and questions the established hierarchies that operate within architecture. This methodological inquiry is focused on developing a behavioral design process, one in which design intent operates through local behaviors rather than through the explicit description or parametric manipulation of form and organization. This approach involves encoding simple architectural decisions within a distributed system of autonomous computational entities, or agents. It is the interaction of these agents and their local decisions that self-organizes design intent, giving rise to a form of collective intelligence and emergent behavior at the global scale. This enables a reconceptualisation of matter within the design process, a shift from form being imposed upon inert matter, to matter playing an active role in the emergence of form and organization.