Roland Snooks, Kokkugia

Roland Snooks holds a B.Arch from RMIT University and a Master in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University where he studied on a Fulbright scholarship. Roland's research is focused on establishing a methodological and conceptual basis for a behavioral approach to design. An algorithmic strategy drawing from the logic of swarm intelligence and operating through multi-agent algorithms. He has taught widely, at such institutions as Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, SCI-Arc, Pratt Institute, UCLA, USC, and RMIT University. Roland has lectured, directed master classes, and been an invited critic internationally, at such institutions as Harvard, Yale, Aalto University, Milano Politecnic, and the Architectural Association (AA.DRL). Roland divides his time between Melbourne and New York.

Snooks is also a founding partner of Kokkugia, an experimental architecture research collaborative exploring generative design methodologies developed from the complex self-organising behavior of biological, social, and material systems. Kokkugia is a networked practice, led by Snooks and Robert Stuart-Smith, with offices in Melbourne and London, operating through design experimentation, research, and teaching.

Kokkugia's work has been published extensively and exhibited internationally, including in New York, London, Paris, Melbourne, Shanghai, Beijing, Moscow, Kiev, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Kokkugia were named the Australian Curators for the 2008 and 2010 Beijing Biennials.

Kokkugia's agenda is to develop a non-linear architecture, one that emerges from the operation of complex systems and questions the established hierarchies that operate within architecture. This methodological inquiry is focused on developing a behavioral design process, one in which design intent operates through local behaviors rather than through the explicit description or parametric manipulation of form and organization. This approach involves encoding simple architectural decisions within a distributed system of autonomous computational entities, or agents. It is the interaction of these agents and their local decisions that self-organizes design intent, giving rise to a form of collective intelligence and emergent behavior at the global scale. This enables a reconceptualisation of matter within the design process, a shift from form being imposed upon inert matter, to matter playing an active role in the emergence of form and organization.