Hyperbody’s Graduation Lab Design Studios involve a research driven design approach, which primarily focuses on articulating the complex relationship between social, environmental, spatial, technological and user based information with physical matter. Focusing on the development of large scale architectural scale urban inserts, the MSc 3 studio investigates the aforementioned information sets in an associative manner with the help of computational and analogue apparatus in order to understand context as a dynamic information field. In order to cater to the inherent dynamism embedded within the context the studio shall investigate real-time interaction as a vital design strategy to attain optimal performance of the designed architectural forms. Strategies for ensuring optimal environmental conditions as well as for ensuring optimal programmatic positioning and enhancing user interaction will be seen as important goals to achieve via the interaction sets. A specific site within Critical urban locations within The Netherlands shall be chosen for the graduation studio within which the students shall conduct an in-depth analysis of intrinsic as well as extrinsic parameters.

The term apparatus itself, shall be investigated from a systems view point to derive notational procedures which, in-turn will give rise to creative mapping techniques and produce measuring rule sets serving as algorithms within the computational domain. The urban context, via such an understanding of an apparatus or in other words a computational abstract machine, will result in the generation of an information embedded genetic blue print of the site under consideration. This Blue print consisting both qualitative and quantitative data, will subsequently be analyzed and experimented with for its potentiality to embody and generate spatial formations with the use of evolutionary computational tools and techniques. Issues concerning material logics, environmental performance and structural optimization will serve as integral fitness goals for experimenting with such computational methods.

The relation between such potential genesis of form and its continual performance in time via auto-regulation of its spatial make-up shall thus become a critical area of investigation in the MSc 3 studio. The term “Formation” shall thus be understood as a self-organizing systemic population of spatial, structural, program and user based agents in time, which result in the generation of an emergent architectural condition. The MSc3 studio shall operate as a vertical studio connecting with MSc1, which would imply knowledge sharing via integrated computation and interaction design workshops and lectures.

The MSc 3 studio shall thus via a variety of exploratory strategies and research experiments pave the way for graduation projects in the MSc4 phase. To summarize, the graduation studio thus creates a solid foundation in computational design, engineering and above all paves a critical thinking process not only necessary for pursuing the MSc4 graduation design project at Hyperbody but also to become a design professional in the contemporary information driven era.

MSc 4 deals, therefore, with the selection of a specific ‘formation’ from MSC 3 and its implementation into architecture. This process requires in addition to bottomup approaches (explored extensively in MSc 3) topdown methodologies for the specific implementation of ‘formations’ into ‘architectural embodiments’. Bottom-up and top-down methodologies will be discussed in the MSC 3/4 studio with respect to their deterministic and non-deterministic, as well as procedural and objectoriented intrinsic nature and their impact on design. In this context, bottom-up metho-dologies refer to process-oriented approaches implying deterministic use of environmental, functional, and structural data for architectural design, while top-down methodologies refer to non-deterministic choices regarding use of formal language, for instance, that are object-oriented and imply a positioning and framing of the architectural work within the contemporary architectural discourse.