Shared micro-architectures

POC LCD – Local Computational Design

What place does climate data have in urban development projects? Couldn’t this data contribute to the creation of local architecture? Could citizens be allowed to use this data to facilitate the construction of bioclimatic micro-architecture? Isn’t the future of urban territories in data sharing and citizen participation? And what if we extended this model to a local bio-climatic architecture, what would it look like?

Digital bricks

The LCD research project for Local Computational Design, led by the design agency Emilieu Studio, Briqueterie du Nord and the thr34d5 experimentation laboratory, consists in developing new services around the manufacture and construction of bricks using digital tools. Behind the term micro-architecture lies several types of small constructions or “aedicula”: street furniture, bus stops, subway entrances, public toilets, etc.

Concretely, the project proposes a service giving access to a database of royalty-free digital design models allowing to easily design an architecture according to needs, climate and context. The ultimate goal is to automatically generate the technical specifications (plans, bills of materials, etc.) required for manufacturing.

A tool with collaborative potential

The LCD project offers collaborative perspectives: the tool enables all local actors to participate in the elaboration of a project and to “parameterise” adaptable structures according to uses and climatic and topographical constraints. The project’s ambition is to involve local actors at the start of the design stage: following the open source model, everyone is free to enrich the database with their own creations. The productions resulting from this research project allow us to imagine digital technology as a lever for the design of bio-climatic public spaces and common areas, an architecture at the service of democracy and the territory.