Escape From the Future: Architecture, Language, and the Computational Turn

“Many people would argue that natural languages are much more broadly based than programming languages, a stance that relegates code to the relatively small niche of artificial languages intended for intelligent machines. Recently, however, strong claims have been made for digital algorithms as the language of nature itself. If, as Stephen Wolfram, Edward Fredkin, and Harold Morowitz maintain, the universe is fundamentally computational, code is elevated to the lingua franca not only of computers but of all physical reality.”¹

N. Katherine Hayles

“…computational irreducibility occurs whenever a physical system can act as a computer. The behavior of the system can be found only by direct simulation or observation: no general predictive procedure is possible.”²

Stephen Wolfram

The creators of this online journal and forum controversially argue that computation will engender the final stage of development in the relationship between architecture and computers by completely eliminating the concept of form from the architectural equation³. The use of language (in this case, the language of computer code) to evade the trappings of form has precedent in the postmodern use of semiotics to free architecture from the formal dogma of Modernism and the Classical tradition. In contrast to the semiotic critique, however, whose analytical methods were defined by the very logo centric system it was attempting to undermine, the computational turn represents a far more substantial historical break, with the potential to create a completely autonomous architecture freed from Classical notions of past and future. This essay explores the evolution from the semiotic to the computational model in architecture as a way of better understanding the circumstances that made these radical leaps into language both possible, and necessary. more »

Process/Drawing

Writing software is at the core of Casey Reas’s artistic practice. The digital is his medium of choice rather than a means of manipulation. He reflects on the evolution of his work in software and why the history of using computers to produce visual images is largely an unrecorded one in the history of art, but why this might all be set to change as scripting takes on a new primacy in contemporary art.

I started playing with computers as a child. Our family’s Apple IIe machine was a toy for playing video games and writing simple programs in BASIC and Logo.1 I spent years exploring and testing it, but I preferred drawing and my interest in computers slowly dissipated. In 1997 I was introduced to John Maeda and the work of his students in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at MIT.

[pdf download]

Metaphysics of Genetic Architecture and Computation

With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, the great spectre that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but vanished, leaving in its wake an ideological vacuum that is now being filled by the tentacles of globalisation with its ecumenical ambition. As humanity has become mesmerised by the triumphant spell of capitalism, what remains less apparent in the aftermath of this dissolution is that the world is moving incipiently towards a threshold that is far more radical and fantastic than any utopic vision since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Once again, the world is witnessing the rumblings of a Promethean fire that is destined to irrupt into the universe of humanity, calling into question the nature and function of life–world relations as they so far have existed. These rumblings, stemming in large measure from the convergence of computation and biogenetics in the latter part of the 20th century, have already begun to invoke gravid visions of the unthinkable: the unmasking of the primordial veil of reality. [pdf download]

Nothing Is Random: Automason Ver 2.0

Figure 1. San Jose State University Museum of Art, and Design Silicon Valley, California, Competition Entry, Worms-eye view, 2003.

5. Nothing Is Random: Automason Ver 2.0

“The ruin mentality appears frivolous, fixated on surface not substance. It is in fact deeply pessimistic, counting more ancestors than descendents, sure without thinking that it inhabits a decadent phase.�

Robert Harbison, “The Built, The Unbuilt and the Unbuildable�1

While computers have dramatically changed the way architects design, construction in the US and around the world is still dependent on a diverse mix of labor intensive processes employing both traditional and nontraditional materials. Instead of focusing exclusively on the digital fabrication of building components in the factory, this essay explores the creation of proprietary software designed to effect meaningful changes in the way work is produced in the field. Enhancing the efficiency and formal potential of conventional building techniques in the present requires an expanded definition of computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM). For this purpose Automason Ver 1.0 was developed around the analogous operation of cellular automaton programs and masonry construction. more »

Dazzle Topologies

One of the great lessons of the 20th Century that our particular generation of architects has inherited is our appreciation of the infra-thin scale: the primal math containing the profound secrets to all animate matter. Whether it is the splitting of the atom, or the isolation of the DNA strand in the first half of the century, or more recently discoveries surrounding the genome project, collectively they represent within their own respective disciplines the smallest increment of information necessary to recreate all possible expressions in the game of life. The significant value for architecture lies in our capacity to speculate upon biological mimesis as a new paradigm for both material and programmatic behavior. In other words, world history has entered into a radical phase where the very destiny of life as we know it can now be altered by reconfiguring the “computational logics” of natural selection. Beyond the profound ethical consequences of these considerations — which clearly need to be addressed — the significance of these advances for contemporary material practices resides in the infinite performative scenarios available in the creation of sentient matter. more »

Transmitting Iconography

“We shall emphasize image-image over process or form-in asserting that architecture depends in its perception and creation on past experiences and emotional associations and that these symbolic and representational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure and program with which they combine in the same building. We shall survey this contradiction in its two main manifestations: 1. Where architectural systems of space, structure and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form. This kind of building-become-sculpture we call the duck…2. Where systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them. This we call the decorated shed.”

Robert Venturi from Learning from Las Vegas¹

Contemporary telecommunication and computer technologies have fundamentally changed the relationship between sign and space, iconography and matter. While Venturi’s model for the decorated shed grew out an analysis of postwar American culture (roadside architecture, urban sprawl and the Las Vegas strip), today’s virtual technologies have created a different world where cell phones, computers networks and the Internet have become ubiquitous.

It is my contention that the “decorated shed”, as Venturi defined it in opposition to the “duck”, is no longer relevant today as an dominant paradigm of architectural signification. Rather an impure fusion of the two is beginning to take hold as information and material processing technologies begin to converge through the shared language of binary digits. Here neither the scenographic nor the tectonic can be considered in isolation. While the “duck” is still relevant, as the self-referential expression of architecture’s internal protocols (see: “Automason Ver 1.0″), this essay is primarily concerned with the effects symbols and images have on architecture as they are transported into built space. more »

Tectonics, Economics and the Reconfiguration of Practice: The Case for Process Change by Digital Means

The current programming culture in architecture could all too easily be written off as a youthful, geeky obsession with the algorithmic and the parametric among nascent practitioners, who have had little if any opportunity to build. The activities of Gehry Technologies run counter to this stereotype. Building on 15 years of experience at Gehry and Partners, Gehry Technologies was founded in 2002 as an independent organisation dedicated to the business of technological innovation and the development of architectural software tools. Dennis R Shelden, chief technology officer, discusses the wider implications
of a concentrated focus on technological tools and organisational processes for designers and the business of building. [pdf download]

Bodies Unfolding

After seeing Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map, a map projected on a flattened isohedron, we began working on the idea of using computer technology to transfer our physical bodies into two-dimensional images. The profundity of simple sculptural gestures translated through the mechanics of a map projection intrigued us. The representation of three-dimensional objects on two-dimension surfaces has been a perennial concern for artists through the centuries. The idea of simultaneity, where an object is experienced all at once -was a major theme of the Cubists and Futurists. “Selfportrait.map” explores this idea in a contemporary way using new digital imaging tools. more »

Cultural Concerns in Computational Architecture

G. Holmes Perkins, 1904-2004

In September of 2004 I attended two events that reflect on each other. One was the Non-Standard Praxis conference held at MIT. The other was a memorial at the University of Pennsylvania for G. Holmes Perkins, my dean when I was an architecture student at Penn from 1959 to 1966. He had died just a couple of weeks short of his 100th birthday.

The “Non-Standard” in Non-Standard Praxis refers ambiguously to Nonstandard Analysis in mathematics and to emerging computational approaches in architecture. Some of the phrases in titles of presentations at the conference include: performativity, topologies, virtual standardization, amorphous space, hyperbody research, immaterial limits, affective space, algorithmic flares, the digital surrational, the boundaries of an event-space interation, bi-directional design process, and voxel space. more »

Genetic Architecture

“All is algorithm!”

Gregory Chaitini

With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, thegreat specter that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but vanished, leaving in its wake an ideological vacuum that is now being filled by the tentacles of globalization withits ecumenical ambition. As humanity has become mesmerized by the triumphant spell of capitalism, what remains less apparent in the aftermath of this dissolution is that the world ismoving incipiently toward a threshold that is far more radical and fantastic than any utopic vision since the dawn of the Enlightenment. Once again, the world is witnessing the rumblingsof a Promethean fire that is destined to irrupt into the universe of humanity, calling into question the nature and function of life world relations as they so far have existed. Theserumblings, stemming in large measure from the convergence of computation and biogenetics in the latter part of the twentieth century, have already begun to invoke gravid visions of theunthinkable: the unmasking of the primordial veil of reality. more »