Essey's abstract:
In contemporary architectural practice, designers are key agents in generating spatial products that afford and even trigger populations of programmatic happenings. Thinking agile, spatial products have to perform efficiently through their lifespan, considering programmatic adaptation and economy. As for millions of years such mechanisms evolve or extinct in nature, it seems that a complete rationale for the developments of spatial products is the conceptual sequence “economy-ecology-ecosophy” which blends traditional and contemporary theories. This rationale may be approximated through observation, experimentation and critique on examples of nature’s architecture. Ontological identification of assemblages in nature’s architecture and generation of digital assembling entities with corresponding attributes and capacities, leeds to artificial life in virtual environment. Their performance in relative time, projects on patterns that designers evaluate in order to make decisions towards efficiency. It seems that in a process of exploring possibilities, designers and artificial life co-evolve.

keywords: artificial life; nature’s architecture; ecosophy; ontology; assemblage protocol.

Book details:
Anastasios Tellios (editor),
Agile Design: Advanced Architectural Cultures
CND Publications, Thessaloniki, 2014
ISBN 978 960 88610 9 1

Agile Design approaches the astonishing world of new design capabilities and advanced techniques in modeling and fabrication that are reshaping architecture. Agile Design is design in a state of constant, intellectual polyvalence while at the same time attempting to claim scientific validity and communicative integrity. Spectacular, innovative and often stylish manifestations of rampant design technologies are there. It describes how gradually, yet persistently, a set of profoundly advanced architectural cultures is being established, conveying aspects of a new and promising paradigm for architecture.

This book is a collection of contributions by designers, theorists, educators and practitioners of architecture, all of whom hold more than one of these identities. It is articulated in three parts: Documentation of tools and matter, Dimensions of nature and life, Research on context and culture.

Essays by (alphabetical order): 
Asterios Agkathidis, Milutin Cerovic, Vasilis Chlorokostas, Marjan Colletti, Vasiliki Dalamanga, Vasiliki Diamanti, Alessio Erioli, Dimitris Gourdoukis, Spyridon Kaprinis, Vladimir Milencovic, Naja & deOstos, Vasilios Papadiamantopoulos, Stelios Psaltis, Fotis Sagonas, Djordje Stojanovic, Ioanna Symeonidou, Georgios Tsakiridis, Maria Tsironi, Alex Tsolakis, Fotis Vasilakis, Stavros Vergopoulos, Maria Voyatzaki, Despoina Zavraka