READING 1: “DIGITAL MORPHOGENESIS” FROM “ARCHITECTURE IN THE DIGITAL AGE: DESIGNING AND MANUFACTURING” BY BRANKO KOLAREVI

In the history of human civilization, each era of technological innovation has brought about changes in the way we build and the products we produce. The industrial revolution brought about steel, and with steel, skyscrapers that could reach unprecedented heights, as well as buildings like the Crystal Palace, which could be fabricated off site and quickly assembled, with a temporary quality that was new to the world of architecture. The era we are living in can be classified as the Digital Information age, and the buildings that have so far arisen out of it can be characterized as complex, nonorthogonal forms, or, as Kolarevi refers to them, “blob” architectures. The reason for this influence of digital technology over new architectural forms is obvious: Whereas before the innovation of CAD and CAM softwares, the kind of complex forms that are typified by, for example, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum and Preston Scott Cohen’s Torus house would have been nearly impossible to conceptualize, model, and construct, not to mention astronomically expensive to build, 3D modeling software now affords the opportunity for architects to easily experiment with forms virtually. However, it is not the physical forms themselves that have been most revolutionized by digital practices in architecture, but rather the means of arriving these forms which will most greatly benefit the architecture of the future.

 

Although digital modeling, a remarkably recent tool for architects, has led to much experimentation with complex forms, these forms are not mere arbitrary manifestations of architect’s most outlandish spatial fantasies: The real revolution has occurred in the approach that leads to these forms. The information embedded in digital models allows architects to set up rigorous mathematical geometries and formulas that are used to generate forms.

 

Architects have always operated by setting themselves rules and orders to design within, but with digital media, they can now make these rules infinite and complex in order to generate the “blob like” forms that have gained such popularity. Instead of designing the forms themselves, architects in the future will design the formulas and parameters that can digitally generate forms, and the manipulations applied to these formulas will give architects infinite variations of forms to choose from. In this way, architectural form is layered with information and rules that inform spaces.

 

The information layered onto structures by formulas can be looked at as a kind of fourth dimension of modeling. Although we refer to software like rhino as 3D modeling software, programs like Maya allow architects to create animated “performances” of architecture that not only generate 3D models, but time-sequenced construction, and the formal manipulations that lead to the final product. This dimension is important not only to help demonstrate how complex forms can be constructed physically, but it helps to explain the seemingly random  shapes that have arisen out of these technologies, and show how logical, albeit complex steps and formulas led the architects to “choose” each form.

 

Although the architecture that most famously demonstrates how the Digital Information age has revolutionized the practice has been mostly complex, “blob” structures, the characteristics of this age will not be in the physical structures that are designed but the methods and means by which they are arrived at. For now, the reason for the complex forms is simply that architects are trying to experiment with technology’s full potential, but just that architecture can now be layered with information not only about the form but about external influences that occur on site will help make better, “smarter” buildings that respond not only to a few but a myriad of conditions. In this way, digital technology could be the long-awaited solution to problems from human comfort within spaces to environmental crisis.