MOTIVATION

The starting point of this work is to challenge traditional perceptions and tools of exercising control upon the transformations of the built environment, which occur in multiple levels in the city. The redefinition of the notion "control", which derived from the need to redefine the concepts of "design" and of the "built environment" itself, is one of our basic concerns linked to our previous and future assignments.

Since the rise of rational thinking (rationalism), both the perception of space and the principles regarding the form, organisation and construction of space have changed [21], [43]. This shift has fairly political, ideological and social origins, but stimulated in brief the establishment of the architectural practise as an activity, which has to be set out before and as a precondition for the production of space. Additionally, the architectural design, the paper on which the architect projects the features of space, has become the absolute measurement and means to control the growth of the built environment and resolve the problems of the city [10], [13].
This view however, assumes that the architect has a unique authority as the person who can perceive all at once an unchangeable, rigid model of space, assuming moreover not only that we can receive and process infinite information but also that this information is clear and certain.
The physical procedures though concerning the actual configuration and transformation of space are much more unstable, ambiguous and unclear that we would need infinite time to be able to capture them all at once.

In this work we consider control under a wider perspective, which takes into consideration the dynamic change of the urban space, emerging from the interaction of multiple actors (authorities, needs, behaviours, climatic and economic conditions, etc) that influence each other in various ways. Challenging the traditional properties of control means to question both the way we interpret the authority (or limits) we have on handling "time" and "movement" [15] and the tools we use to design and monitor the transformation of space. In this light, we also investigate the possibility to set the architectural practice as a "continuous decision-making process" and approach the architectural design as an open, continuous and temporal activity.

The fine goal of this assignment is formed as effort to understand, design and control built environments that can be adapted in real-time to the change of behaviours and needs. More specifically we try to study environments that embody the following properties:
- They are designed, configured and adapted continuously in real-time.
- They interact with the users and respond to their changing needs.
- They process different types of data coming from multiple sources, thus enabling different users to participate to the design.
- They can store prototypes of collective behaviour and knowledge and apply it intelligently in different circumstances.
- They are self-organised and function autonomously to a certain degree.
This investigation hence, is oriented towards two directions. The first is concerned with the realisation of a new CAD tool, a control mechanism that can be connected to the geographical world in real time and support a constant and multi-participatory design. The second is concerned with the exploration of the properties that underlie the creation of intelligent and adaptable built environments that change some of their basic traits according to the users' interaction and the change of needs.