Neil Leach & Philip Yuan

Richard Aoun

Photo: Ursula Frick & Thomas Grabner

“Fabricating the Future” by Neil Leach and Philip Yuan concisely explains the era and concept of parametricism and digital fabrication.  From exploring the factors that define the concept, the use of new techniques, the change of materiality, and eventually, the whole new approach of design. He focuses on digital tools, materials, digital fabrication, aesthetics, design approach and methodology. Neil Leach considers digital fabrication as a new style of architecture, a different approach rather than just visual values. He explains that digital tools, such as new software, are at ease between design and construction. “They provide an highway to explore architecture… as a series of inter-related and logically conceived parts assembled into a coherent whole.” This change in approach goes simultaneously with a change of process that digital fabrication brings forth. These new technologies change the previous modeling object design to a modeling process design.

An emphasis on hybrid materials and computational design is noticed on materials and machines. Mixed materials are a hybrid which brings forth the best of tectonic materials into a new material which performs better. New materials are considered more efficient. 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 sequence, in terms of design and fabrication. Leach supports the promotion of truly computational design where the machine adapts and develops designs rather than just helping the volume representation. “These changes provide novel possibilities for a material-oriented computational design approach in architecture.
Also, 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”.

Digital tools and fabrication is being used in the right way and following the right path as a leading power into our future. Parametricism is bought as a new style of architecture through new technologies, new fabrication processes and new approaches. To be ranked world widely, this new style has to be a leading force. It is therefore very important to research the low-cost applications of architecture. This can lead to design activism chances in needed areas around the world.

Time in modern world is going really fast. Everyday we can observe new inventions in
technologies, mathematics, chemical, physics, etc.With all of it we can go deeper in understanding of live around.
On one hand it makes live easier, on other hand more complex.

We can look on it from point of  constructing and engineering.  Modern tools can help us to produce more
light and strong structures, safe money and time. Like parametric design which typically refer to biotectonics.
We can find different, great solutions how to produce something from world around (nature), especially in macro world.
It is a difficult goal, because when you want to use this kind of data, you should spent lot of time in details and calculations.
This implies considerable amount of knowledge, but finally it could be great result.
Architects and engineers of nowadays can use all power of mathematics in theirs work. For example a geodesic structure
of British Museum in London by Norman Foster + partners. It was a really specific goal how to cover roof space of quiet old building
and develop courtyard inside. Because of the shape of rooftop it was really difficult to use classic methods of hyperboloid structures.
But they solved this problem by deep mathematician calculations, that helped to build completely light and modern form.

Anyway humanity goes straight forward to future and it would not be a place for old expensive, costly on money and materials
ways of building. For it we should genesis new forms and new types of understanding  Architecture.

During the reading of Alison Smithson article I went deeper in understanding what does it mean “knowledge in nature”.
In fact Saint Jerome during his live was addicted (if it possible to say like this) to knowledge,
but because of time when he lived in some moments it was difficult. Then through time different painters started to depict him in theirs paintings.
They were always depict  him in a different spaces with different details and this spaces were individual understanding of them.

I understand that details in painting were symbolize how Saint Jerome was feeling a life.
I want to transform it to how should Architect feel live in my opinion.
Architect should be as a conductor from environment around to people.
Juan Nuvel always says that  sacred duty of architect is to send positive emotions  through architecture you build to people.
If we will go deeper, we can understand from where architect can find positive emotions.
They are around. In food, drinks, music, movies, paintings, etc. But emotions, are not only  positive feelings. It is also inspiration and knowledge.
When you can study from nature around, you can find absolutely new horizons in what you design.
Thats what green architecture means. You explore enviroment around and then you use that knowledge to optimize, to integrate your ideas in live.
And to send your feelings.

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There is an undeniable link between mankind and nature, but if we were to graph that using time and connection as parameters, it will show as a descending line.

Contemporary life is defined by cities, concrete forests where even the green areas have been designed and feel artificial. This drives individuals away from their own essence to an artificial realm. In ‘The Conditioned Outdoor Room’, Bernard Rudofsky argues that the link between environment and mankind can be mended. He supports his theory by reminding us of our anscestors and the way they used to integrate a garden in the house, not as a separate space, but as a ‘room with sky as a ceiling’. He states that while the relation between us and nature deteriorates we lose parts of what make us human without realizing it.

Throughout history man has always strugled with the forces of nature. Climate has been more of an enemy than a friend. We could not control it, but we could hide and protect ourselves from it. First hiding in caves and later building their own habitats.

A home is called a shelter – a protective space where we feel safe, where we control the climate and where we seal out nature. But even with this attitude towards the environment, nature was not completly forgotten.

Today we speak of the indoor life we have settled into, subways as the ‘revival of the cave’.  Using technology to control the indoor environment we are just reinforcing what our anscestors were doing. Hiding. Sealing. This ultimate control of temperature, humidity and light solely through technology weakens the proverbial ‘if you can’t beat it, join it’.

Rudofsky proposes that we do join nature, within reason. He raises the issue that using a garden properly can improve the quality of life, that they can end up being ‘ oasis of delight’. Rather than sheltering ourselves in, can we not find comfort outside.

This introversion has pushed us to make the outdoor a fabric of wasted space.

Giving examples from Asia to Europe, he examines the pattern in wich he examines how the garden is used in relation to the users thoughout time.

He critices contemporary american lawns, which represent more a space that need exesive care than one that provides joy. Nature should not be viewed as a sacrifice of time, space and energy.

Rudolfskys proposal is one of interconnection between built environment and natural environment. He proposes integration of garden within a home. Walls would offer detachement from outside leaving one to feel more protected and making the garden more habitable. The walls act as a confroting factor and a privacy screen.  The reference to Ancient Rome, the way they used nature to generate a particular mood favorable to spiritual composure, strenghtens this idea and can be adapted to modern life.

Loosing ‘the essence of being human’ can be prevented through good design and nature-integrated solutions. The use of todays technology not to seal ourselves in, but to open ourselves up, will scrub away the artificial layers of contemporary lives.

A critical analysis of the book Swarm Intelligence – Neil Leach

As we all know about many examples of swarm logic in nature, they all do, without thinking, always use the most simple way of constructing – because it imposes itself as the most logical one. Because insects like bees don’t rethink their decisions, they don’t have the capacity for that, but they don’t even need it. Fish don’t really think about the way they are forming groups, it’s a part of their genetic code. Because the nature creates simple rules, which when followed, without exceptions, always work in the best interest of the community.

On the other hand if we observe a correlation between a man and his neighborhood or a city and comparing it to an ant colony for example we can see huge number of differences. But the one thing is impossible to oversee, that the city same as an ant colony works using the same system of “reading” the response information from the single agents. Because on the end we realize that in both cases the solution to development , constancy and stability of the whole system is reciprocal interaction.
A city grows in a same way that its parts are developing, although his agents (in this case residents of the city or a neighborhood) are unaware of this fact, with every action they are contributing this commune intelligence. Taking an example of a micro scale of a human body- what one cell does doesn’t really make a difference, but set of cells, organs and on the end the entire organism are capable of making truly complex decisions on various levels.

If we go back to the response information that we are getting from each agent as an individual, in micro scale, inputs are something we should be focused on. My interpretation of this book is that we should be more concentrated on designing interactive systems rather than separate units. Because the system is something that is interactive, the system can develop and response to the needs of its inhabitants. All the answers about creating such a system are right there, in front of us. Ours is just to recognize them and implement the same simple rules, using the today’s tools of visualization and computational techniques to test it and to find the best solutions of implementing it in the new architectural systems of tomorrow.

“Fabricating the Future” by Neil Leach and Phillip F. Yuan.
 
Critical essay by Hristo Kovachev explains the development of the parametricism trend, digital fabrication style, use of materials, approach of design, tectonic methodology and logics. Those themes are presented as an evolution of new fabrication techniques that are using a complex, multi-dimensional materials in architectural practice and indicate they emergence throughout the conventional concept of craftsmanship and use of traditional materials.
 
Digital fabrication has to be operated using computing machines in order to provide accuracy of composite materials during building process. However computational design should not be seen as a supporting service for visualizing design since it can also provide learning possibilities for machine and material to help with the design strategy.  It appears as a new style in designing process rather than just an improvement of design aesthetic values. Opportunity for form to follow logic profoundly affects the exploration stages of a design and assembly of the project. Exchange of the data between computational system and physical material enhances complexity of a form and speed up the fabrication process. Appliance of this complex network in varied scales creates an opportunities for advanced assembly between machine and material, between the process of design and construction as well as between architect and fabricator.
 
Digital tectonics has it’s origins in traditional fabrication techniques that control the development of material and structure. As a result when we talk about digital fabrication we need to employ use of automated machines in order to enrich functionality of tectonic material and possibly create a successor that has an increased performance and extended life cycle. For it’s efficiency and sustainable qualities, eg, decreased mass waste and time of assembly, parametricism can be easily shared and manufactured in worldwide scale according on the site needs, economic possibilities etc.
 
Improved materials and new technologies inform conceptualization and production of architectural design and put into motion the concept of mass fabrication and mass customization. Development of techniques and structural properties of the materials can produce continuous geometry surface that optimizes the material usage, cost and possibly is widely available. Construction of single unit from eg, unfolded two-dimensional material into three-dimensional unit brings opportunity for structural stability capable of bearing greater loads.  Moreover the ease of components to assemble and disassembly enhances prospect of temporary constructions.
 

BIG Little Denmark project, which attempted to map sociological behavior by simplifying it to the data points of monetary consumption

In DeLanda’s review of Deleuze, one of his primary summaries is that oscillating behaviors form the patterns of actualization behind molecular, biological, and socio-technic structures. If accurate, then this base principle could be used to build virtual models of such processes, and to generate new models based on the same patterns of organization.

The behavioral oscillations in molecular and biological applications are clear, and DeLanda includes illustrative examples. The socio-technic applications are less obvious and, though referenced in passing, are left relatively unexplained. If such behavioral patterns in this context could actually be identified and refined, they might offer a much-needed step toward building sociological models and turning the more elusive factors of the built environment into actionable data points.

[BIG's Little Denmark project attempted to simplify the sociological condition of the built environment into a map of the resources and entertainments monetarily consumed. Economic activity is easily recorded, and therefore easily mapped and modeled. Perhaps if other sociological forces could be mapped as accurately, we could start to superimpose these models in a way that could generate verifiable data.]

Though the existence of swarm intelligence and the emergence of complex intelligent systems is supported through research at many scales, certain questions arise when thinking about implementation at the scale of our cities. Does a knowledge of the existence of emergence as a social phenomenon play into our societal structure? If so, who are the actors in implementing this knowledge? How is it implemented? How do we overcome the paradox of implementing strategies which will strengthen the phenomenologics of swarm intelligence within our societal structure while curbing the development of a top-down state where knowledge of the systems overall operations are reserved only for those who are in the know?

There is a veritable line in the sand between the opposing approaches of top-down organization and bottom-up hive intelligence, but either strategy in isolation does not produce tangible results. Effectively, the bottom is too dumb to produce due to the simplicity of its operations relative to scale of the system. The bottom essentially is composed of components which perform, in the Darwinian sense, simple yes/no computations to accumulate local knowledge that is fed into the database of the system. The system, on the other hand, is far too complex for the derivation of universally applicable rules, and its collective conscience too impatient to wait for the bottom to self-organize. Thus, we see an shift in scale not only in terms of the breadth of the collective knowledge, but also in the understanding of time. The growth of the system results in deeper and deeper clustering of information and the intensive organization of form, differing fundamentally to the invention and application of derived form. We can then begin to redefine the notion of formal design or organization to coincide not with the behavior of the system, but to the behavior of the agent of the system and its local interactions.

The methodology of behavioral design is discussed by Kokkugia in ‘Behavioral Matter’, as it relates to swarm urbanism and the shift from the notion of a ‘master plan’ to that of a ‘master-algorithm’ at the urban scale. Through this re-appropriation, we can see the beginnings of a response to the posited question of implementation, and that the fundamental hierarchies of urbanism such as scalar time and intensity of agents acting in the system are platforms for the development of this logic. For the Melbourne Docklands, Kokkugia proposed urban structures by firstly using the self-organizing design agents of the system to reform the matter in the creation of circulatory and infrastructural networks, and by secondly programming urban elements and topologies with embedded behavioral traits. In this experiment, all elements in the system are conceived as agents which conceptualize and form complex environments through behavioral operations.

The embedding of behavioral design methodologies within urbanism offers a step forward in bridging the gap between top-down intervention and the slow-burning power  of the hive mind. It also manifests the ‘editor’ within the agents themselves, based on an extrapolation of their behavior rather than an derivation from the overall composition of the system. As Kevin Kelly identifies in ‘The Bottom is Not Enough’, editors are a means by which to maximize the efficiency of the collective through moderate top-down intervention, while not hindering its operations. Although he is talking about the world of digital publication, the same basic principles apply at the urban scale as they do to omnipresent information systems such as Wikipedia. Though they operate in principal through bottom-up formation, the need for expertise on a particular subject requires a the existence of an ‘expert’ which can provide a clustered wealth of knowledge. Clustering which occurs in Wikipedia can then be identified as an agent-based algorithm which is embedded from the top-down into the system itself, taking cues from the behavior of the source rather than the overall behavior.

Thompson himself identifies that most websites possess more collective wisdom than any given city, but lack the ability to effectively cluster and process the received information in the same way. As the breadth of digital knowledge continues to widen, the process of editing through embedded behavioral algorithms becomes for complex (Kelly imagines in one day to include controlled edits, peer review, verification and authentication certificates to name a few). If the Wikipedia of 2056 will better represent the idea of a complete encyclopedia due to the ever-increasing complexity of its ‘designed’ editing process, perhaps the same level of complexity embedded into our urban environments can similarly streamline our world.

references:

Kokkugia. “Behavioral Matter”. Swarm Intelligence: Architecture of Multi-Agent Systems. Ed. Neil Leach and Roland Snooks.

Kelly, Kevin. “The Bottom is Not Enough”. Swarm Intelligence: Architecture of Multi-Agent Systems. Ed. Neil Leach and Roland Snooks.

Thompson, Steven. Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software. New York: Scribner; 1 edition (Sept. 10 2002)

Thompson, Steven. Only Connect. thegaurdian. 15 October 2001. Accessed 20 November 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/oct/15/society

In the chapter we read from the book “On Growth and Form”, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson analyzes the study of the form of nature primarily with descriptive methods and later in an analytical way, mathematically described and represented by mathematical formulas and coordinate systems.

The analysis of the forms by mathematical description are made ​​in four different ways: by changing the dimensions of the coordinate system; by changing the direction and dimension of the point of origin; by making the coordinates system oblique through changing its position to a certain angle; and finally by using radial coordinates coming from a single point.

An important point mentioned by Thompson is that he could mathematically describe the nature in a generalized manner, but never in a particular way. For example the mathematical description of the shape of a wave in the ocean that will never be the description of a specific wave, that has its form depending on its origin and its relationship towards the winds of where it is.

We can find the application of descriptive systems by mathematical coordinates in 3D software we use for graphic representation of architecture and design.

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.