KAFD Metro Station. Visualization: Zaha Hadid Architects

Architecture and urban environment have been adapting all the time through the history into the socio-economic and nowadays the technology have been innovating the tools to create an infinite world of possibilities and especially for architecture and urban planning through digital animation techniques.

The employment of animation, simulation, form finding, parametric modeling and scripting, have inspired a new collective movement with radically new ambitions and values. Demanding an increased level of articulated complexity for the Contemporary Avant-grade architecture implementing design tools to design on the basis of parametric design systems. Patrik Schumacher defines the heuristics of parametricism as negative and positive: The negative heuristic is to avoid common and rigid geometry and the repetition of elements. While on the other side, the positive heuristic interarticulate, morph, deform, etc. considering all forms to be parametrically malleable making this a heuristic of almost no boundaries at all with less rules and more flexibility.

Patrik Schumacher proclaims parametricism, as the great new style after modernism although I believe it is soon to think of it as the great new architectural style. Modernism was also not really a style, it was the effort to reconcile the principles underlying architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernization of society. If Parametricism is a proper style then it has to be borne of a similar urgent necessity to the one that gave rise to Modernism.

The constant innovations and adaptations nowadays have allowed us to explore more complex geometries and structures and it is impossible to think of stopping innovating and stay static in this world. We have to let the time tell us if Parametricism has a long term future, we need to let it evolve and explore all of it’s possibilities. I personally want to research about this new “style” (Though I believe that there’s no point on claiming a style of today for any reason other than the glory of narcissism) to recognize, measure and simulate the complex patterns and simply work in whatever manner is more suitable for this movement.

In ordinary architecture, our world is arranged to the word “function”, divided into black and white. Life is sustained by the acts that lie between them, as Sou Fujimoto explains in his text Primitive Future. The opposite realities of the prime states of architecture are the nest and the cave. The nest is a “functional place” built as a hospitable arrangement to satisfy the prior needs of the people or animals and the cave is the result of a natural accident whether it is hospitable or inhospitable to the people, although the nest and the cave look similar, they are opposite concepts.

For instance, between inside and outside, between nature and artifice, space cannot instantaneously switch from one to another but the space lies in the gradation that exists between them creating a whole new diversity of concepts giving architecture a new world of possibilities. Different gradations create different types of experience in the transition from A to B, nest to cave, nature to architecture.

Like a “hazy area”, the ideal architecture is a place where inside and outside merge. As a sense thought of as the ultimate architecture, it can be called only in-between where all places are connected and are simultaneously detached creating an infinite range of conditions that lie between detachment and connection.

For example, the Wall House by Frohn and Rojas, is a house where the wall, as a complex membrane, structure our social interactions breaking down the traditional walls of a house into different layers where you can see the two opposite concepts of artifice and nature, you can see the gradation from private to public, starting with the concrete cave, stacked shelving, milky shell to the soft skin, creating different atmospheric environments connecting nature but also isolate from nature. It’s a hybrid on internal-private and external-public environment creating a blurred connection of layers as you go inside “the cave”, it is more detached from nature.

As a detached-fit, architecture is simultaneously a connected-fit. The relational logics are systems of interaction, connection and alterations in the experience that happens in the experience of “in-between” architecture creating an infinite range of conditions that lie in between them. Therefore the concept of architecture is a new existence possessing the diversity of nature and the lucidity of artifice.

Sustainable architecture, more than a tendency, is a great need nowadays and in the future. For me, this is a very important topic that I want to study. Understanding the negative environmental impact of the buildings will help me to research new systems and efficient ways of the use of materials, energy and the right development of space.