S333.Studio | Project details

This project attempts to contribute to discussions about the intensification, transformation and mutation of the centres of traditional cities.

It is based on the hypothesis that the current destruction of historic fabric to create new sites for urban development will soon cease to be politically acceptable.

Instead, the project investigates how the design of high buildings could emerge from, be informed by and ultimately co-exist with the spatial and physical complexity of the historic city.

Computer software to generate a ‘parallel ecology’ of high buildings has been developed with Professor John Frazer, Dr. Ming Xi and Professor Liu Xiyu from Jinan’s Shandong University in China.


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This project attempts to contribute to discussions about the intensification, transformation and mutation of the centres of traditional cities.

It is based on the hypothesis that the current destruction of historic fabric to create new sites for urban development will soon cease to be politically acceptable.

Instead, the project investigates how the design of high buildings could emerge from, be informed by and ultimately co-exist with the spatial and physical complexity of the historic city.

Computer software to generate a ‘parallel ecology’ of high buildings has been developed with Professor John Frazer, Dr. Ming Xi and Professor Liu Xiyu from Jinan’s Shandong University in China.

Since the 1970s Professor John Frazer has been investigating the fundamental form-generating processes in architecture, considering architecture as a form of artificial life, and proposing a genetic representation in the form of DNA-like code-script, which can then be subjected to developmental and evolutionary processes in response to the user and the environment. The aim is to achieve in the built environment the symbiotic behaviour and metabolic balance found in the natural environment.

Working amongst urban blocks in the medieval centre of Groningen, the starting points – or seeding rules - for towers are the size and shape of each internal courtyard.

Towers adapt in response to adjacent towers; the voids between the towers morph; twisting floor plates enable separate buildings to be connected for additional structural support; the successful results of connecting towers together are expanded in the seeding rules for the making of the higher levels.

This project also proposes a fundamental change in architectural practice; the role of the architect is not so much to design a building or city as to catalyse them: to act in such a way that they may evolve.


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