Seeing the world through a philosophical point of view, concepts such as toughness or rigidity are emergent properties of metalic materials that result from the complex dynamic behaviour of its components. Also dynamics of population of dislocations are closely related to the population dynamics of every entity, despite the big difference in nature and the behaviour of the components, a population of interacting entities, will dispay same collective behaviour as long as the interactions are non linear and also as long as the population operates in a non thermodynamic equilibrium.

The use of tools coming from non linear dynamics and non equilibrium thermodynamics is crucial. By using techniques corresponding to strong non equilibrium conditions,  then we can achieve conditions of non thermodynamic equilibrium and process different kinds of materials. The study of material complexity as well as the awareness of the self organising capabilities of matter tends to emerge in the field. James E. Gordon  said:

“The widespread use of steel for so many purposes in the modern world is only partly due to technical causes. Steel might euphemistically be described as a material that facilitates the dilution of skills.”

Gordon is looking at how the double danger is affecting creativity for structural designers. The first danger as he states is that a singe universal material is appropriate for all different kinds of structure, either deling with compression or with tension. He is sugesting the use of biological materials such as bones and that suggests that new structures will achieve continues variation with parts of the structure apripriate for each property, either compression or tension.

My opinion is that the ‘bio-materials’ are a source of inspiration for the designers as well as the use of them in big structure can open new possibilities in the design itself. On the other hand i think there are ethical constraints that are against the use of these materials, such as bones. The cominity is not ready to adapt to the demand of the structural change and the change of materiality in every day use.

Critical essay by Rodion Eremeev

The world always generate new directions in Art and Architecture. It always implies new techniks and fabrication ways.
During the 20th Century it were a lot of different variety of styles - functionalism, constructivism, brutalism, metabolism, etc.
Nowadays is a time of a digital ways of design in Architecture.

Neil Leach book  ”Digital Tectonics” distinctly explains what does it mean Digital. How does it affect on architecture, design, art, live…
And also explains how it were developing through the years.

In chapter “Historical Perspective – Future Prospect” Mike Cook represent to our attention three key factors that were influencing on the form -
material,ability,need. By this factors Mike try to explain that is fundamental determinants of what we build. On the different examples like projects and experiments of Gaudi or Frei Otto,
he is showing how they used to work with modeling, simulation and fabrication without any computer tools. He is thinking that now is great ability than ever before to create a free form.
That old physical methods of modeling and describing form are still relevant, but now is digital age. Digital tools and methods will help to humanity to create buildings that would conserve materials and energy.

As I understand, Digital Tectonics means that you can go ahead from sketches on the paper to really difficult simulations.
That means that now, computer is really relevant tool for architects to design intelligent structures. Human mind can imagine and produce a lot,
but it has a limit and from that point to develop more complex things we should use computer to help us with it.
From idea to paper, then to 3D model and simulation, then to digital fabrication – that all involves Digital Tectonics.

Image credit: http://blogs.ethz.ch/girotmasla1213/tag/grasshopper/

Book by Neil Leach, David Turnbull and Chris Williams

Critical essay by Trinidad Gomez.

‘For how can the digital be tectonic? And how -for that matter- can the tectonics be digital?’ Neil Leach

In this book, Neil Leach explains the behaviour between digital and tectonics, and how nowadays we can see this popular topic as a new paradigm for thinking architectural culture.

This concept is developed since the first contributions in the field of computation changed architecture, how “Emergent” behaviour participated in the evolution of the digital and engineers system, and how the architecture has evolved, because of the participation of other disciplines, such as economics, programming, engineering, etc.

Steven Johnson developed the concept “Emergence”, explaining it as a system made of relatively simple elements, organized spontaneously and without explicit laws,  giving rise to intelligent behaviour. Computer programming is just a set of rules, where every of this set has only one possible interpretation and all these rules together can make a big result, but just if they work as a system, where in this book assumes that the design by algorithms works like this.

The interesting part is, that this system doesn’t need any kind of intelligence to make it a possible result, but of course they have the power of calculation. So in this part, it begins to have issues with this fact, because it appears that computers do everything, but at the end, designers are in charge to control all that they are designing.

Nowadays, the architectural process is linked with engineering more than ever, because of the facility of the control of the design and the ease to develop the complex shapes.

Everything has a method of design with a mathematical explanation, since Le Corbusier’s module has an algorithm process until now Zaha Hadid’s projects has a very complex programming code for obtain the unique shapes and surfaces.

In conclusion, a new paradigm of architecture related with digital tectonics has developed more complex digital platforms that helps to understand more closely all the details that are related to architecture whereby this results in the fact convert algorithmic language of part of architectural process nowadays. Engineer and architect’s relationship is now more than ever linked to the development of more complex structures and surfaces, converting architecture not just as space but a very complete detail process.

‘Architecture was born not of the algorithmic potential of computers programs, but the tectonics capacities of actual materials’ Chris Williams.

[Riches] – A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum.

A new Kind of science is a book dedicated to understand how science has evolved in such aspects in systematic computational systems such as cellular automata.The discovery that simple programs can produce complex behaviors caused a dramatic paradigm shift by claiming that the universe and everything is being computed by a simple program.

Wolfram  explains how the cellular automata  works A cellular automaton is a model of a system of “cell” objects with the following characteristics.

• The cells live on a grid.
• Each cell has a state. The number of state possibilities is typically finite.
• Each cell has a neighborhood. This can be defined in any number of ways, but it is typically a list of adjacent cells.

A cellular automata works like is a row of cells that change colour according to set rules. If a cell is white, for example, and its immediate neighbours are white, then the cell remains white. Alternatively, if a white cell’s neighbours are both black, then it turns black.

Most of Wolfram’s analyses deal with the simplest possible cellular automata, specifically those that involve just a one-dimensional line of cells, two possible colors (black and white), and rules based only on the two immediately adjacent cells.

But the most relevant application that Wolfram’s has developed is the Rule 110 that shows how that sequence evolves.

The author first starts by proving that a “tag system” that removes 2 symbols at each step is universal by compiling a 2-state turing machine program. After that, he proves that a glider system can indeed implement a tag system. It is a step by step process. Then, he studies the space time of CA-110 to find the gliders and asociate them to the glider system correctly.

Two unusual features of the proof of Turing completeness are that, firstly, it looks highly unlikely that such a very simple rule could do everything, and secondly, is that the proof requires an infinitely long repeating background on which to work.

Describing how simple computational mechanisms can exist in nature at different levels, and that these simple and deterministic mechanisms can produce all of the complexity that we see and experience.

He makes the point that computation is essentially simple and ubiquitous. Since the repetitive application of simple computational transformations can cause very complex phenomena, as we see with the application of Rule 110, this, according to Wolfram, is the true source of complexity in the world.

Low tech fabrication, Silk Wall, Neil Leach, Philip E. Yuan

Neil Leach; Fabricating the Future

Leach’s text on Fabricating the Future precisely explains the trend and style of parametricism and digital fabrication. From defining the factors that affect the style, the use of new technologies, the shift in materials, and ultimately, the way of designing. The main topics in the text are digital tools, digital fabrication, materials, drawing logic, aesthetics, design approach, and design methodology. Each of these themes are explained and compared with previous techniques and traditional fabrication.

On digital tools and fabrication, he places digital fabrication as a new style of architecture, a style that regards a different approach to architecture rather than an aesthetic value. He explains that digital tools, such as new software, are enablers between design and construction. “They provide an avenue to explore architecture.. as a series of inter-related and logically conceived parts assembled into a coherent whole.” This change in approach goes hand in hand with a change of process that digital fabrication brings forth. These new technologies change the previous modeling object design to a modeling process design. This opens a new way of communication between the designer and the builder (fabricator), a communication that allows reciprocal information exchange between computational systems and physical objects which in turn enriches the design and smoothens the fabrication process.

On materials and machines, he makes an emphasis on composite materials and computational design. Composite materials are a hybrid which brings forth the best of tectonic materials into a new material which performs better. This shifts the traditional and predominant tendency to layer envelopes and materials to achieve the desired effect to a single, new material, which does the job more efficiently. This efficiency in material is what should drive sustainability as it does in other design areas as industrial and machines. The idea is to achieve energy efficiency by lowering the ratio mass/performance which allows lower embedded energy and  consumed energy in the life-cycle of the material. This is supported by machining processes, in terms of design and fabrication. Leach supports the promotion of truly computational design where the machine learns and helps designs rather than just aiding the drawing representation. “These changes provide novel possibilities for a material-oriented computational design approach in architecture.

In practical terms, it is very interesting what is being done in China in terms of Low-Tech digital fabrication. Since most of the world still doesn’t have the technological nor financial means to use technologies and materials coming from the western world. This low-tech solutions are based on utilizing new fabrication technologies and traditional materials and “effectively reprograming them  (both digital tools and traditional materials) to deal with our situation as a redefinition and deep consideration of architectural design and fabrication logic.

Finally upon the aesthetics of this new style, he considers that “placing digital fabrication as a tool or approach to architecture rather than a style or from decision maker. Negotiating and restraining the visual opulence of these compositions is an operation that entails elegance.” It is important to understand this, since algorithmic modeling and parametric design itself doesn’t bring aesthetic beauty by itself, but it requires the designers ability to bring forth the beauty out of the logic behind it. This process requires “a highly sophisticated formal language – including the driving force of aesthetic pleasure – propels elegance”.

In summary, fabricating the future is both an explanatory text of how digital tools and fabrication is being used as much as how it should be used and where it is leading to in the future. A complete text that thoroughly explains new technologies, new fabrication processes, and new design approaches and how these create a new style of architecture, parametricism.

For this new style to become a new driving force in word architecture is absolutely important to place it in a worldwide reality.  Hence, it is of uttermost importance to explore and research on how to apply this new technologies to low-tech and low-budget architecture. I personally believe that any achievements on this field will have the power to change the world and solve many of the problems being faced in third world countries and catastrophe affected regions.

In the extensive work on Digital Cities Neil Leach critically approached the vital importance of Digital technologies and their development for the future of urban design as a creative sub-field. In the past 20 years the boom of Digital Technologies and their grand entrance into the world of practical and rigid-minded modernist architecture has rapidly taken over the place in architects’ thoughts, designs and conversations. Architectural subcultures of “parametricism”, cities following swarm emergence development, the entire conglomerations of living and breathing systems unifying into so-called Chlorofilias; highly theoretical, and for the most part speculative theories have created a shift in the “frozen” architectural thinking of the 20^th century in the unknown, yet promising direction, and gave it a new platform for theoretical evolution at the least.

Several driven design studios from all over the world have taken on a challenge of pushing the boundaries of architectural thinking and established their practices on creating cities not constructed from stone and mortar, but rather from dimensionless bodies, entire essence of which reacts to the inhabitants’ presence, is controlled via a hypothetical electronic device and are ecologically sustainable as their components are idealized pieces of information, rather than mortal molecules.

Architectural design is experiencing an apparent split in the direction of its development. The parametricism veterans are imagining urban scenarios, where human becomes a mere living organism that receives feedback from the digital city and readjusts it accordingly to his needs, through the use of advanced technologies. But is this a possible reality of our future, or will it remain yet another period of architectural history that has a provoking name and takes up several shelves in the design literature library? How viable is pushing the boundaries of theoretical research in architecture when the mere purpose of it is to construct physical objects that create atmospheres for us to inhabit? What scale of world calamities or scientific progress has to happen for the current built environments to start re-arranging themselves following Chlorofilias scenario?

Will it happen in the nearest millennium? And will our race be the witness of this possible hypothetical future? An apparent gap between the evolving fictional theoretical “universe” and the harsh reality of such day-to-day issues as lack of shelters in underdeveloped countries is somewhat unsettling. While the advancement of science through research is a vital part of our progress, some of the work force and creative minds should attempt tackling the current pressing issues prior to fully dedicating their talents to imaginary utopian habitats. The feedback from solving the “NOW” problems will greatly inform the platform for developing the guaranteed “TOMORROW”.

Swarm Intelligence based (http://chemoton.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abc-newspaper-article-swarm-intelligent-based-text-mining1.jpg)

Swarm logic is indeed one of the new approaches in emerging to describe a form or a system in many aspect. The idea of swarm intelligence basically is a “population” of local interactions to the environment in a greater amount that create a global system. This swarm intelligence expression was first introduced by Gerardo Beni, Susan Hackwood and Jing Wang in  1989 in the context of robotic systems which describe the emergent collective behavior. Nowadays this new approach of collective behavior has diversely implemented in many perspective, from biology (human, animal and trees), social structure like economic, engineering, architecture, until as artificial as robotic, and computer science, etc. From the example of Steven Johnson’s “Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software”, he wrote about the idea of creating a “form” of living, on having emergence logic from the smallest scale as ants and cells, into a larger scale as neighbor and cities. He tried to define how complex system is being formed by local interactions. And how such colony of ants’ behavior, the swarm logic, can give example of way of living for human level.

Collective behaviors provide a big role in creating a large social element such as neighborhood, or city. There is sometime a repetitive behavior, and sometime a diverse or even spontaneous behavior. Repetitive such as sleep-work-eat do create a rhythmic of pattern that can be “calculated” in a neighborhood. And the contrary, a variety of behavior can gives knowledge and the ability for neighbor to adapt in any circumstances. These create traces of patterns in social behaving, also gives a principles of self-organization. It creates a city.

I like the idea in the chapter of Kevin Kelly’s “Bottom Up is not Enough”, it tells about how the proper quantity of top-down is needed but still the dumb hive or bottom-up has to be more. Having “editorship”, expertise – I would call also master-planer, are like vitamins, that is having too much can give toxics, or not giving a good quality the master-plan itself. But somehow we need a right amount of them to control. This bottom-up intelligence reflect how local interaction can rise and emergence to a collective behavior with a decentralized and self-organizing systems. I’m interested about how to erect and “calculate” design process with this system based on behavioral design methodologies. From my previous blog summarizing the book of “Tarzan in the Media Forest” by Toyo Ito, I tried to question on how the idea of changing behavior can generate a system or methodology on defining a form or a design. From the chapter of “Behavioral Matter” by Kokkugia, this behavioral design methodology can interpret complex order in such design. And one of the way is desolating hierarchies, quote “the dissolution of hierarchy causes a shift from the notion of master-plan to master-algorithm in urban design”. This change of paradigms cause a change process of deciding such design. And such design needed a tool, or in this case multi-agent technology. First is the capability of designed agent to self-organize urban mater, and second is that urban agents are used in creating infrastructure and circulatory complexion. This technology is not to map out the motion of swarming but to define a system that produce collective behavior in the form of urban structure. It is to recognizing the swarm intelligence, the emergence logic, the collective behavior onto creating a form of global interactions, or cities.

Econnected City, urban design for Damasco, Ergin Birinci & Rocky Merchant
http://complexitys.com/english/urbanparametric/#.UqD6cxbkpac

The 21st century has brought a different style of architecture. This is Parametricism, defined by avant-garde structures and the use of new tools and techniques to produce seamless fluidity in buildings. Not only do these tools aid to draft the models, but they also generate designs. Parametric design proposes an ordered complexity and at the same time the articulation of systems that compose a structure, such as facades, structure, circulation, etc.

Not only does parametric design apply to architecture, but it has started to play a role in urbanism. We are used to the modernist urban layout with straight lines and 90-degree angles, the style Le Corbusier acclaimed as order and organization. But in the last decade this concept has had a different outcome. Parametric urbanism simulates patterns that emerge from self-organization. Not only does parametricism apply to the geometry, but it analyzes the operations and systems that make up the city. The idea is to create a model of a city that could regenerate itself with the changes in society over time.

The main concern throughout the book is if parametricism and the new design tools can be used to model or reformulate cities.

Two examples of utopic cities are considered:

1. Chlorofilia, Los Angeles in a post-apocalyptic era where a new city has evolved. It is self-sufficient and regenerates when it needs to, as cells do in the human body.
2. An ideal neighborhood composed of a bio structure that builds itself through the Viab (its construction apparatus). Citizens have a stretch connection with the habitat itself.

These examples are just ideas of what the cities of the future should look like. The book suggests that cities developed in a laboratory can have positive results. On the other hand Manuel De Landa states, “Digital simulations used for these processes must be quite complex.”¹ A city will not develop merely by following rules imposed by a program. It needs agents that are able to make decisions and attribute these to others. And although the future suggests inter-disciplinary practices in terms of architecture and urban development, we need specialized planners to shape the city of the future.

I strongly support the advances being brought up in urban topics, and wish that these concepts could be applied to real cities. As for right now, I do not believe that parametricism or any other paradigm has the necessary foundations to determine the growth of a city and have a positive long-term result. Every city is different and has its own growth pattern.

Indeed I do believe that in the geometrical context, parametric design would have an asserted outcome. Although it seems to have a complex organization opposing orthogonal principles, a certain type of order can be achieved with well-articulated elements that imply direction and location.

In the meanwhile, parametric design has been successful in smaller scale environments, like buildings or single urban blocks.

¹. Leach, Neil “Digital Cities”; page 54.

(Image Source : http://www.informatblog.com/partnership-google-apple-nel-futuro)

“it’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want” is a well-known phrase spoken by the deceased CEO of Apple. Apple users know best why they purchase apple products. It’s so easy that it blends into your hand. It’s so easy that you don’t know why it is so easy.  that’s the result of a top-down design. You are pretty much disoriented but you still don’t feel it, you just feel good and in control. While Google relies on experiments and data from the users out there. The company used the data offered by customers as input. By googling, you are giving your data. And google is smart enough to bring you in as a design partners. The result is that you know where you started, where you are going and where is your destination.

The design approach of these two giant companies are far opposite. It is undeniably interesting when you put something so intelligent into a kid’s hand and he know exactly how to use it. In the other hand, you put something not so intelligent with a manual to a 15 years old, what’s going to happen? He is likely going to start learning about it. I have heard so many arguments on the topic Apple vs. Google and I am not here to judge which one is better. I am going to compare one small tangible design to another massive-atmospheric urban scale design. And we can see how these two universes are close to each other.

Digital Cities talks mostly about urban design works produced by help of computational methods. Parametricism, Swarm Intelligence, Breeder, Urban Experiments, Morphogenetic Urbanism, or even smaller scale like Hyperhabitat etc. I’ll start with the bright sides. I have been astonished by the intelligence of these tools and aware how they are going, rapidly, to change the face of the planet. From the human scale – Chlorofilia, we can’t deny that that is not going to happen. The birth of it is on the timeline already. If it is something that humanities need then it is going to happen and expand eventually. The documentary was a hugh provocation. Manuel DeLanda’s Urban Simulation is a great example of how to extract the best interest out of the people the design was for. The continuous and discrete theory seems to be a perfect interweaving of the city and it’s population. When he talked about the discrete models of urban simulation where he introduced “multi-agent” system, an agent whose decision is specified by rules. The agent follows the rules but also produces an emergence. Is the agent an individual? or a community? And this push the boundaries of agent and the city far closer. Either way, there are good and explainable connection between these two.

The connection and relation is, of course, a total different thing. Emergence doesn’t know the whole. It is a part of the whole, however. So we might say that the only relation of the two is that the emergence build the whole without knowing so. What is the use of it the

n? Would it be ok if we put an entire of ant colony into an abandon colony? Will the ants still work as they do in their old colony? My guess would be yes. They would probably know exactly what to do. They still have their basic instinct that we know for sure. They still have their neighbors and they still get their work done by the end of the day. My thinking is that they won’t feel very happy for some reason and will start reforming their home. It is a thin layer between the agent and the surrounding, either in bigger scale or smaller, it’s in the cloud area of 5 senses. We can ignore the fact that these ants will never learn anyways so why bother teaching them how to grow but we can’t do that to human. We learn through 5 senses. Putting human into a new earth, we just going to find out how we got there. So if the relation is in the senses, does the digital intelligence have enough soul to fill that gap? The feeling of touching the wood, the smell of dirt, the humidity of the rain forrest, the force effect of a new landmark in town, the festival lights? These are inputs that only the population a.k.a. customers can give. Any scale of agent, these are the most truthful and determining factors. The type that Google wouldn’t hesitate to grasp. The real source for bottom-up approach. It is a surprise how we are so familiar of technologies today without questioning them so much. I guess we can make that clear by pairing product design with urban fabric, and by pairing user’s interface with community behavior. So until the computers are able to detect the senses as good as we can. It will still be top-down.

Source: http://www.stephenwolfram.com

“If one looks at different species, one sees all sorts of different patterns; but there are definite classes. And here´s the remarkable thing: those classes are the same classes of behavior that one sees if one looks at all possible simplest relevant cellular automata”.

The work of Stephen Wolfram tries to rephrase the theoretical and methodological laws of the universe from a mathematical point of view; Wolfram makes many studies that lead to provocative results and conjectures, some of the most important from my personal opinion are:

1. Simples rules can generate complex behavior.

2. All modern mathematical methods can deal with complex systems like the ones in biology and social sciences.

3. All of the systems can be viewed as computations; even the most complex ones have an equivalence with simple rules.

He use this conclusions to try to understand and mold any kind of the natural phenomenal; the main thesis that he explain is called “The Principle of Computational Equivalence” or PCE, and he bases almost all his book in hundreds of computer experiments that use Cellular Automata, or CA, which consists in a lattice of sites with an associated state, usually defined by 0 or 1; each one of this sites is related to a rule that usually depends on some small neighborhood from nearby sites; this latter is the essential part of the PCE.

One of the most important formulations of the PCE is: almost all processes which are not obviously simple, can be viewed as computations of equivalent sophistication; this implies that it does not matters how different are the underlying structures, all complex systems are computationally equivalent; because of this, the traditional continuous mathematical models for natural systems cannot perform any more sophisticated computations. Almost all the book is written in a colloquial way, to be more easy for understand, but there are approximately 300 extensive pages of code notes that are almost impossible to read for the majority of the people, and even though Wolfram introduces hundreds of simple rules based system and provides the source code for these in Mathematica format, unless you are an expert in this software, fragments of code will not be particularly helpful.

From a perspective, Wolfram´s point of view is pessimistic, because he suggest that classical continuous methods can never model the behavior of systems with the kind of complexity that you can find in the nature, and instead of it, is better to use the simplest Cellular Automata model. Because of the behavior of these systems can be only understood by simulations of them, his ideas mention that the equation is irrelevant to understand the natural phenomena for any kind of complexity; consequently, the Cellular Automata models cannot provide comparable insights into the understanding of the natural world that continuous systems do. But this is an argument that can be either true or false, depend from the person and the lector; and this is only a personal opinion.