Algorithmic Architecture

[sanraj]

Library of Congress Cataloging | English | ISBN-978-0-7506-6725-8 | Jun-2006 | PDF | 2.71 MB | 177 pages

Algorithmic Architecture or the Computeras a Double?
What should be the exact scope of the computer’s involvement with architectural design? This question has been present since the beginning of computer aided architecture. It played, of course, a fundamental role in the first reflections and experiments regarding a possible computed or cybernetic architecture in the 1950s and 1960s. It did not disappear with the advent of post-modernism. The latter’s concern with the linguistic dimension of architecture and urban design and the possibilities of formal exploration offered by the computer went hand in hand1. It is only during the last decade, with the spectacular development of computer graphics and the fascination exerted by the strange forms, the blobs and others that began to float on the designers’ screens that this question was momentarily suspended. Now that this fascination is beginning to fade, the issue is back with all its complexity. There is no better proof of it than Algorithmic Architecture, since this book is primarily addressing the problem both at a technical and at a philosophical level. Typically, the positions regarding the role of the computer in architectural design fall into two categories. For many designers, the computer is just an advanced tool running programs that enable them to produce sophisticated forms and to control better their realization. For those designers, although the machine does alter significantly the nature of the architecture that is produced, it is not necessary or even desirable to enter into the details of its inner processes. Despite their claim to the contrary, the greatest part of the blob architects fall into this category. Kostas Terzidis belongs clearly to the other camp composed of those who think that it has become unavoidable to enter into the black box of programming in order to make a truly creative use of the computer. In this perspective, a large section of his book is devoted to the exploration of what the mastery of scripting techniques can bring to architecture. More than these technical insights, the main interest of Algorithmic Architecture may very well lie in the relation it establishes between the detailed examination of the possibilities offered by the computer and more general interrogations, of a philosophical nature, on the design process. One of Terzidis’ fundamental tenets is that design is not properly an invention, the creation of something absolutely new. It should rather be considered as the result of an unveiling or a rediscovery process. There is something almost pre-Socratic, or, to take a reference closer to our time, neoclassical, in this conception of design as a kind of return to an existing state of things that has fallen into oblivion. The pre-Socratic perspective would be to consider after Empedocles or Parmenides that nothing comes out of nothing and that the new is just the extant seen from a different vantage point. Neoclassical aesthetics and design theory starts as for it from the assumption that the quest for beauty is about recapturing the fresh inspiration that prevailed at some point towards the origin of art, an inspiration that accounts for the enduring value of archetypes. Part of Terzidis’ ambition lies precisely in rethinking some of architecture’s most fundamental archetypes in the light provided by computation. There is something both disturbing and stimulating in a conception of design centered on the unveiling or the rediscovery. The disturbance becomes even more profound when Terzidis tells us that we shouldn’t consider the computer as an extension of the mind, but rather as a partner in the design process with fundamentally different aptitudes and ways to reason. The computer is the Other of the human mind, not its mirror. There, the possible points of reference are to be found rather in the first years of computer aided architecture, when pioneers like Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, were presenting the introduction of computing in the design process as a dialogue between partners or “associates”2. However, Terzidis’ perspective differs because of its insistence on the radical otherness of the computer.................................... It is not a book on computer and architecture. It is a book on architecture...................................... .........

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