Technological innovations have transformed not only architecture but the quality of human life innumerable times in our history. There is a constant “chicken-egg” relationship between cultural events and technological developments that, when innovated and improved upon by architects, inventors, and developers is referred to as the “feedback loop”. While cultural and architectural transformations and movements drive the development of technology, new technological developments simultaneously provide opportunities for cultural innovations. One example of this feedback relationship is the development of the skyscraper as a result of the implementation of steel in architecture, in conjecture with the invention of the elevator; The skyscraper would not be possible to build and use without an elevator, but there would never have been a need for an elevator if there were not these buildings of such great heights.
Ali Rahim’s “Techniques and Technology” explains the difference between a technological advance and a technical refinement: The example he uses is that, while the internet is a technological advance, since its invention has had a qualitative effect on the lives of those who use it (today almost all of the industrialized world), while the fact that modems today are much faster than those of 10 years ago is an example of a technical refinement. While much technological development relies on scientists and engineers, architects also perpetuate technical innovation by pursuing creative means of applying existing technologies and improving upon them until they have been exhausted to the point of developing a whole new set of technology. Architects rework existing methods, but also integrate technologies that are used across many technical fields ranging from film production (Maya) to aerospace and automobile design (CATIA). The design practices that Rahim calls “technological practices” not only use and improve upon but generate new technology, not merely for the sake of efficiency but to explore new methods and approaches to designing.
An example of this kind of innovation undertaken by “technological practice” is the integration of a fourth, temporal (time) dimension into how building forms are generated. While conventional practices see time as mechanical, a “neutral container for events”, and even, theoretically reversible, “technological practices” hold a thermodynamic concept of time, in which processes that occur in time are irreversible, because events produce not only numerical changes but qualitative changes. The “temporal techniques” employed by these firms are defined by three common characteristics: First, contrary to the conventional practice of building “top-down” architecture, that is based on a partie and strives to uphold it throughout development, temporal techniques work in a bottom-up approach, developing simultaneously the many parts of a building within many parameters. Second, temporal techniques are nonlinear, meaning that architectural decisions are not mere 1:1 cause/effect relationships but constant and generative, so that ideally, the end product as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Third, temporal techniques include both numerical factors that are controlled and generated by the architect and virtual, sometimes uncontrollable components.
Two types of temporal techniques that Rahim discusses are generative and transformational. Generative techniques, which rely on automotive and film software that have been developed for architectural purposes, were used to create Greg Lynn’s Hydrogen House by defining several environmental and internal parameters that were subject to change over time (S(t)) to generate forms that responded to the parameters to degrees manipulated by Lynn. These parameters rather than physical partie informed the spaces and forms of the Hydrogen House. Transformational techniques were used by the Kol/Mac studio in the project Housings. This technique applies irreversible shape manipulations to surfaces and forms at points so that not only those points but the entire surface is effected in unpredictable ways. By this technique, architecture evolves and takes on a life of its own that is arrived at in the very end. It is the extreme of bottom-up design.
We cannot begin to predict what technologies will evolve out of the 4d software that are already being used by digital practices, but if history is any indicator, time will not be the extend of dimensional exploration for architects.
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