Lines of Flight, Human

Team: John Kim: Associate Professor Macalester College, Partner, Futures North; Adam Marcus: Associate Professor California College of the Arts, Partner, Futures North; Molly Reichert: Associate Professor in Practice UMN, Partner, Futures North. 

Lines of Flight, Human aims to spatialize historical and cultural data related to the site’s history; serves as a dynamic and engaging public artwork for both people within the space and pedestrians on the street level; and meets design standards for reducing bird mortality.

Lines of Flight, Human is a large-scale architectural facade design completed for the new Public Service Building in Minneapolis that examines the history of human migration to the region and its impacts on human and non-human life. The project employs a range of computational techniques to spatialize cultural data about human migration and dispossession in the design of a pattern that meets bird-safety standards for buildings. The work is situated within theoretical discussions of site-specificity, land acknowledgment, the politics of immigration, procedural art, and best practices for bird mortality reduction.

The paper discusses the project as a case study in data spatialization by reviewing the design process, which employed custom algorithms to integrate data-driven and recursive workflows that integrate cultural data, communicative design, and bird-safe parameters. Discussion of the research reflects on the project’s implications for future design of communicative facades, the limitations and biases of data-driven design techniques, and the potential to expand these workflows to engage with other aspects of building performance.