In cracks between the evangelical facade that cocoons parametric modelling with a blanket of positive writing, you catch glimpses of dissent. These are the things you catch people talking about in private between drinks – tall tales of unexpected work, of rebuilding the model, of mistakes and incompetence. As significant as it is, I have never seen anyone write a whole paper on it (unfortunately so much of what is important goes unstated in the rules of publishing). The following six quotes are as close as I have ever got:
- David Gerber: “When the topology of a project changes the [parametric] model generally needs to be remade…” (2007, 205)
- Rick Smith “A designer might say I want to move and twist this wall, but you did not foresee that move and there is no parameter to accommodate the change. It then unravels your [parametric model]. Many times you will have to start all over again.” (2007, 2)
- Jane Burry: “… to edit the relational graph or remodel completely is also commonplace.” (2007, 622)
- Dominik Holzer et al. “… changes required by the design team were of such a disruptive nature that the parametric model schema could not cope with them.” Part of the model was rebuilt. (2007, 639)
- Robert Aish and Robert Woodbury: Parametric modelling “may require additional effort, may increase complexity of local design decisions and increases the number of items to which attention must be paid in task completion.” (2005, 151)
- Mark Burry: If a critical change is made “there is no solution other than to completely disassemble the model and restart at the critical decision.” (1996, 78)
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Aish, Robert, and Robert Woodbury. 2005. Multi-level Interaction in Parametric Design. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 151-162. Berlin: Springer.
Burry, Jane. 2007. “Mindful Spaces: Computational Geometry and the Conceptual Spaces in which Designers Operate.” International Journal of Architectural Computing, 5 (4): 611-624.
Burry, Mark. 1996. “Parametric Design and the Sagrada Família.” Architectural Research Quarterly, 1 (Summer): 70-80.
Gerber, David. 2007. Parametric practices : Models for design exploration in architecture. Harvard University.
Holzer, Dominik, Richard Hough, and Mark Burry. 2007. “Parametric Design and Structural Optimisation for Early Design Exploration.” International Journal of Architectural Computing 05 (04): 625-644.
Smith, Rick. 2007. Technical Notes from experiences and studies in using Parametric and BIM architectural software. Notes. http://www.vbtllc.com/images/VBTTechnicalNotes.pdf
This review of Mark Burry’s Scripting Cultures (On Amazon
) – like my review of The New Mathematics of Architecture (also by Mark) – carries the disclaimer that Mark is the supervisor of my PhD. I should also confess to illustrating the project in the final chapter, for which I will shoulder the blame if it doesn’t look as good as the other chapters.
Scripting Cultures investigates why designers choose to script. Burry suggests two motivations: productivity and control. The evidence for these claims consists of a biographical account of Burry’s own work, intermixed with a set of ‘thought experiments,’ and a set of interviews with thirty of the industries leaders (including: Casey Reas [Processing], Robert Aish [Generative Components + Designscript], John Frazer [An Evolutionary architecture], Axel Kilian, Neil Leach, Denis Shelden [Gehry] and Hugh Whitehead [Fosters]).
On the surface, productivity and control seem like utilitarian motivations to script, especially when compared to the writing normally associated with scripting: chest thumping proclamations of new paradigms footnoted with references towards incomprehensible continental philosophy. In place of these typical grandiose proclamations is a very honest assessment of how scripting can be applied to the design process. Burry admits that despite being introduced to scripting in a class taught by William Mitchell in the 1970′s, he had no interest in scripting until he needed it for part of the design of the Sagrada Família in 1989. And even after picking up scripting Burry says he still finds it difficult and time consuming – as do all of the other 30 scripting wizards he interviewed. Burry’s openness about the scripting process is not a dry utilitarian argument (despite appearances) but rather a refreshingly frank account of how scripting can augment the design process.
Burry sees the designer as central to the design process. His definition of design – the “mapping of an idea through to an intended outcome” – focuses on the designers aspiration rather than fetishising algorithmic effects. As such Burry views scripting as a conduit to enhance the design process, whether it is using productivity to iterate faster, or whether it is using the control of scripting to break free from the confines of black-boxed drafting software. The second half of the book focuses on a number of case studies where this happens. The case studies are characteristically honest about the challenges they faced and design method employed. I personally preferred the first half of the book to the case studies, but that might be because I am familiar with the case studies – I imagine someone who has not scripted before could find it insightful to see the nuts-and-bolts application of scripting in practice.
The book concludes by arguing for scripting as “an essential component of 21st-century design education.” In doing so Burry cautions against classifying scripting as a single culture that could be seen as an “exclusivist force.” Instead Burry affirms the importance of the designer in the scripting process, suggesting scripting is at home with the many cultures of design practice.
From my non-objective point of view, Scripting Cultures seems to articulate a maturing in our understanding of digital practice, away from self-congratulatory ego-shots demonstrating how clever we could be with scripts, and towards a time when scripting becomes a part of the everyday culture of design. For beginners I imagine this un-embellished description of scripting could offer some useful pathways into understanding the history, culture and role of scripting in design. For experienced scripters it is reassuring to hear 30 experts tell you they find it difficult as well. My major gripe with the book is that it only comes in physical form. For a book that so fully celebrates the capacity of technology to contribute to culture, waiting for it to be printed and mailed to you seems a little perverse. This is made even more stranger by the fact that Wiley – the publisher – is relatively progressive in making AD the journal available online. Yet for Scripting Cultures not even the contents is online (I put it below) and equally strangely there is a website where you can download some of the scripts from the case studies http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-611118.html but it was not mentioned in the book. However medium aside, Scripting Cultures makes an important contribution to the culture of scripting.
—
Somehow I have managed to end up with two copies of Scripting Cultures. If you would like my extra copy (its hardback) enter your name and email below. On the 17th of November I will randomly select someone to send it to. If you don’t win you can always pick it up on Amazon and leave a comment on this post. Good luck!
18-11-2011: The winner of the competition was Harri Lewis, a post-graduate student at the University of Bath and blogger at HarriLewis.com
—
Chapters:
- Scripting cultures
- Contextural summary of computing, scripting and speculative design
- Cultural defence
- Resources
- Dimensions
- Scripted productivity: Gaudi’s rose windows
- Composition and form
- Simplifying complexity for fabrication
- Scripting narrative space: Our world and The Third Policeman
- Performative scripting
- Cultural account: Scripting and shifts in authorship
- Glossary
- Scripting tools
- Recommended reading
Brooks via www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_fred_brooks/
Fred Brooks once made up the term ‘computer architect’ to describe himself. In the process he created a whole new (and lucrative) job type. It is an apt description of Brooks, whose entire career entangles computers and architecture. If you read this blog, it is probably an apt description of you.
At the time Brooks coined ‘computer architecture’ he was project manager of the development of System/360 at IBM, a risky unification of the IBM product line that saw IBM replacing all of its computers with ones that were not backwards compatible with their old systems while their competitors released computers that were. These computers are the reason a byte has 8 bits, why colour pickers have 256 colors, and why you can only put 4gb of RAM into your 32 bit machine. Brooks reflected on his experience at IBM in his seminal book: Mythical Man Month, which explores the challenge of solving a complex problem with a large and disperse team. In it, Brooks explains how adding people to projects can make the project slower, why 9 woman can not make a baby in one month, and why architects and programmers are alike.
His latest book The design of design: Essays from a computer scientist (2010) is perhaps more architecture than it is computers, but it follows a similar vein to Mythic Man Month of examining how to organise and manage, complexity and creativity. There is something refreshing about about a book that places design as the central focus of design. The text itself is peppered with quote worthy soundbites: ”the hardest part of design is deciding what to design.” This quote builds upon Gorden Glegg’s assertion that “sometimes the problem is to discover what the problem is” and follows Brook’s own argument in the book that computer scientists (or designers) can not fully describe a problem until they start working on it, and part of the programming (design process) is discovering the problem. Initially it concerned me that much of what Brooks was saying was never taught to me in architecture school, although on reflection I think it implicitly had. As Morpheus said in the Matrix “there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path,” and at architecture school I definitely walked the path of design.
The design part of the book is interesting, especially at a time when architects are drawing so heavily upon the work of computer scientists, it is nice to see things go back the other way. But by far the most curious part of the book is the two chapters that follow the design section, the 26 pages Brooks writes about “A computer scientists dream system for designing houses.” Brooks has some experience designing houses, listing himself and his wife Nancy as the architect (‘architectural designer’) on three house designs, which are treated as case studies later in the book. I find this section curious for a couple of reasons:
Firstly it serves no obvious purpose in the book. I like to think of Brooks cursing at his CAD software and vowing he would write a book about how to do it better. There is something comforting to about an 80 year old man responsible for many of the features of modern computers, a man who has won the Turing award in computing, struggling like you and I to use CAD software. Although apart from humoring fellow architects, it is hard to know the exact point Brooks is trying to make to his fellow programmers in this fairly large section of the book.
I am not even joking
Secondly after saying all these wonderful things about design being problem discovery and design not being a suitable candidate for AI, Brooks ends up describing the worse CAD software since 3D Dream House Designer 2000. In Brooks’ program, the architect describes a house using their voice:
- Give me a three-bedroom Georgian House.
- Face it North
- Mirror-flip it left to right
In his software, Brooks seems to have forgotten all those wonderful things he said about the design process, and instead has created a fanciful interface for describing a building, which it is totally inept at aiding problem discovery. The juxtaposition between the early sections of the book on what design is, and the later sections of the book on what a ‘dream system for designing houses’ consists of, almost seems like a devastatingly crafty critique of computational design. Indeed it is true most CAD software today focuses on solution descriptions, as evidenced by CAD typically being brought into projects during the detailed design / design documentation stage after the primary problems have been discovered – Frank Gehry I am looking at you. Even when the digerati work with computers early in the design stage of a project, the application is typically so contrived that at best it is solution discovery (but normally it is just solution description through a very convoluted language). So I am left wondering what a dream system for designing houses would look like? I am left wondering whether computers can ever be part of problem discovery? And as ever, I find it somewhat unnerving to have our assumptions about design and CAD software spoken back to us by the first computer architect, Fred Brooks.
Edit: (12-March-2011) Matthew Grayson has kindly pointed out that Brooks won the Turing award, not the Turner award, and that it is 256 rather than 265 colors in a color picker – updated accordingly.
A reader emailed me last month to ask, amongst other things, why I had not written about Lars Spuybroek. A fair question. The honest and slightly embarrassing answer is that I never made it past the pictures in the NOX books, dismissing the whole thing as blobitecture. Strange how you can arrive as such an entrenched position with so little provocation, and ironic because Spuybroek says the word ‘blob’ gives him nightmares. So I added Spuybroek to my Christmas reading list [1] and choose The Architecture of Continuity to get started on because it had the least number of pictures to distract me.
Two pages in and I almost named my first born Lars, four pages in I almost threw the book down in disgust, and things didn’t really pick up from there until about page 200, from where the book meandered between insightful and irrelevant (see graph below).
From this graph it is clear that all of the good parts are where Spuybroek is not talking about philosophy, but unfortunately Spuybroek loves nothing more than talking about philosophy. Most of the time it is clever, although irrelevant, intellectualism. For example when talking of a hanging chain model (pg 20), Spuybroek writes:
I call this the ‘Semperian reversal’: the reversal of the order of the four elements. Instead of starting with earth and a wooden frame to support the weaker textile fibers, I reason the other way around: weak threads move, find each other, and lock into each other, building structure and rigidity. So instead of adding the soft to the rigid, as Semper did, we see a transformation of soft into rigid.
Now hanging chains are wondrous things, and there are many things you can write about them. You could talk about them in terms of mathematics, in terms of the design process, in terms of architectural history, even in terms of the demise of the flying buttress, but fairly low down on the list would be talking about them in terms of the order of Semper’s four elements of architecture. That is not to say Spuybroek is wrong, but it is a powerful insight applied to a insignificant topic.
This critique is applicable to almost any passage in the book, which often struggles to find purpose. One of the causes may be that the book is a collection of essays, presented in chronological order but not dated (except in some endnotes tucked into the final pages). It is not until you reach these endnotes that you find out the early fragments of the book are almost 15 years old (accounting for their philosophical bent), and the entire text spans 10 years. A lot has changed in digital architecture in this time, although Spuybroek does not dwell on it.
When Spuybroek does get to the point he seems to hold a similar position to Schumacher, arguing that architecture has lost its way, and that there should be a unification of style brought about by digital technology. Schumaker and Spuybroek diverge in their definitions of this style. For Schumacher this style is derived from the qualities of the digital: gradients of difference, independence and a softness of form. Spuybroek however returns to the Gothic, and argues for an architecture of continuity. Much of the book is spent either explaining what continuity is or explaining why Spuybroek is Gothic. It is an eloquent and well researched argument but what Spuybroek calls himself and what he calls his style, is not as important as arguing why continuity is desirable or arguing why the digital enables continuity (especially when the Gothic could do it pre-digital) . No doubt he has an answer, but it is not in this book. In this sense I think Schumacher takes a stronger position. Leaving aside any arguments about style, at least Schumacher’s Parametrisism is based in part on the nature of digital tools, whereas Spuybroek is far more eager to discuss philosophy than the digital.
wetGRID NOX architects
These jumps in logic carry into his projects. Taking the wetGRID project as an example, Spuybroek explains how Frei Otto’s wool-thread machine optimises paths through a space – which it does (See image below). He then uses the method to generate paths between two colonnades and wraps the paths with a skin to house art. Somewhere in there Spuybroek has made the assumption that optimum paths through a gallery would be desirable, and that the wool-thread machine makes optimum paths in this situation (it doesn’t because it can not guarantee a route that does not involve retracing where you have been). So we are left with a beautiful structure that due to some hidden jumps in logic is devoid of the properties Spuybroek went to great lengths explaining. I am afraid this could be seen as an analogy for the entire book. I think it is dangerous to have students reading authors like Spuybroek, imitating his projects and ending up with a pastiche of well known algorithms. If you want to learn about philosophy and digital architecture read Kostas Terzidis’ An Algorithmic Architecture, if you want to hear about the demise of architecture read Neil Leach’s The Anasthetics of Architecture, and if you have a Christmas to kill, and can put up with all of Spuybroek’s meandering, then on about page 201 you will find some good stuff in The Architecture of Continuity.
Lars Spuybroek / NOX Architects website
Wool thread model - From Schumacher - Parametricism - AD 2009
1. I also read Bill Bryson’s At Home, a book on the history of architecture. It does not quite fit into this blog but I would say it is one of the best architecture books I have ever read and easily the most enjoyable. Find it and read it.
It has been a strange week. It started in Copenhagen with me teaching students how to build wooden reciprocal frame domes. I was preparing to leave Copenhagen and spend some time in London so that I could, amongst other things, gate crash the launch of Patrik Schumacher’s new book The Autopoiesis of Architecture. But as I was packing my bags, my Grandfather died. I decided to skip London so that I could return to my family, and I spent the next 48 hours recreating the journey my Grandfather made when he was my age and immigrated to New Zealand from London – only his trip cost 10 quid and took 6 weeks. At some stage while I was floating in the jet-stream, in between timezones I have never visited, I received a message from London, from Patrik Schumacher, in response to this blog post, that began: “Hi Daniel, Don’t be such an ungenerous prick!” To be fair, a Google search for “Patrik Schumacher” used to show as the 9th result: “By far the biggest villain in all of parametric design is Patrik Schumacher,” which is a quote from me, so his response was on the level. Schumacher mentioned being “attacked by a blogger from Australia,” in his lecture at the launch of The Autopoiesis of Architecture, and at almost the same instant Schumacher made this statement, on the other side of the world, I helped bury my Grandfather.
I don’t place any significance on the interweaving of these two events, but I do find the circles in the narrative interesting.
Once things settled down, a long debate between Schumacher and a couple of other readers emerged on the blog. It seems a shame to hide such a significant debate in the comments, so with this post I want to highlight what was said, and direct your attention to the original comments (here) – although judging by the number of people who have ‘confessed’ to reading these comments (as if this blog is my secret diary) you might already know about them.
There is something to be said about the character of Schumacher that he would respond to critique like this. I think it demonstrates that Schumacher is serious about Parametricism – this is not just some idea he dreamt up for a speaking gig or as a way to increase his publication count (not looking at any academic in particular). His response is not so much a defense of Parametricism as it is an invitation to participate, for even a rebuttal of Parametricism achieves Schumacher’s goal of getting architects to consider how ”harnessing generative computational processes” advances architecture. With such a broad idea, an idea that Schumacher is still – very publicly - working out, in a very fractured community, it is little wonder he has stepped on a few toes. But it is apparent from both his words and his actions that he wants others to join in refining this vision.
On the name Parametricism, Schumacher writes:
“Perhaps you can try to come up with a better label, or argue why you think that any such labels are not useful. This argument was made quite a lot – and I have an answer to that: a name is an anchor for self-description, collective reflection, and a fighting slogan for outward proselytizing and media recognition. Why should we leave these advantages to others. Why should we impoverish our discourse?”
Parametricism is definitely double sided. On the one hand there is something very marketable and memorable about it, which is partly why students are so seduced by it. On the other hand it invokes notions of parametric design, when Parametricism is fairly agnostic to design methods. I think for many people in the area of computational design, it is hard to get past this, it has taken me almost three months.
On the perceived lack of context for Parametricism, Schumacher writes:
“I am not a full time lecturer, I am a practicing architect before I am a theorist, and I have a lot to show even before going into somebody else’s work … I encourage anybody with the passion, insight and the time at hand to do this work of presenting the best work within the framework of parametricism.”
An almost perfect critique of Parametricism would be to evaluate historic architecture in terms of parametricism principles. This would get away from the application of other value systems in the discussion of Parametricism and would critique it with its own logic.
On the design methods that applied to Parametricism, Schumacher writes:
“Do not forget that parametricism as a style is not only defined via its design techniques but also via its ambitions and certain key features of its results, i.e. the general increase in the spatial complexity (sustaining an increase in programmatic complexity) as well as the general intensification of relations, i.e. an intensification of communication between spaces within a building and between the building and its surroundings. We need to understand what all this is good for in the end. What are the advantages of parametricism for the progress of our civilisation?”
Is ZHA a parametric firm:
This was very articularly answered by Matei in some earlier comments, but Schumacher adds:
“ZHA projects are always following the heuristic principles of parametricism , even if not all of them are always computationally driven. But we should also not forget that an intelligent and talented designer can – to a certain extent – articulate adaptive correlations between object and context, volume/façade and environmental parameters, between the variously differentiated subsystem within the building via mere modelling without deploying algorithms. The intelligence that is able to invent and think through such correlations is prior to its computational implementation. And, to a limited extend there can be ‘computation without computers’.”
And finally, on emergence vs parametric
“You make an interesting point about GA s in the context of a circumscribed optimisation problem, but you might decide to speak about bounded vs boundless emergence, or introduce the concept of relative degrees of circumscription with respect to emergence.”
For some reason ‘degrees of boundedness’ really resonates with me and has helped start me thinking about what happens in the middle of these two extreme positions.
—
I am still tentative about agreeing with Schumacher, but what is the alternative? People are more than willing to kick him, but are reluctant to put forward their own vision – I very much belong in this group. In this sense perhaps Parametricism has been unsuccessful at getting architects to consider how ”harnessing generative computational processes” advances architecture, for we have become so focused on our niche it is hard to see the advances of architecture through the details of parametricism. In a weeklong twist of fate, I have become sympathetic to Parametricism and Schumacher’s arrogance, and I fear yet another blog post might need to be dedicated to Schumacher once my copy of The Autopoiesis of Architecture arrives.
William Mitchell sits between architect, science fiction writer, and perpetual optimist. The world needs more people like him – if only to combat the ecological pessimists, and baby-boomer guilt. His enthusiasm for the future of architecture helped spawn the MIT Media Lab, and gave rise to some particularly entertaining books (ME++ and The City of Bits, among others). Like anyone who predicts the future, Mitchell is wrong more than he is right. He is definitely wrong in The logic of Architecture. However, the myth Mitchell tells in The logic of Architecture is not interesting for Mitchell’s incorrectness, but for what this incorrectness can teach us about our own myths.
Roughly speaking, Mitchell’s thesis can be broken down into three parts:
- We can express architecture as words, and these words can be expressed in a logical syntax.
- We can use grammar to anticipate what will come next in the logical syntax.
- We can use this to design architecture.
Mitchell wrote this in 1990, so while logic programming and shape grammars were in existence (Mitchell did work on them in 1978), Mitchell’s contribution was to provide a framework to popularise these concepts. Much like the 1960′s space planning movement, the projects that flowed from The Logic of Architecture were fruitless applications of enthusiasm and computation, although it did produce some sweet patterns. We are still living with the residual effects of this, and the following list is lessons that I think can be taken from the failure of The Logic of Architecture:
Architecture is not binary
One of the most valuable lessons I learnt at architecture school was to be cautious of anyone speaking about binaries – they are most likely wrong. Mitchell is no exception. Many of his grammar rules are based on the idea of something being ‘adequate’; the structure is adequate to hold up the building, the room is adequately proportioned for the function, ect. These are all binary conditions, the structure is either adequate or the structure is not adequate. This naive view of the world masks one of the biggest problems with Mitchell’s system: in the real world there are degrees of adequacy and the architect’s main job is satisficing the conflicting objectives of a project. Resolving conflicting goals in a digital system remains an unsolved problem, and a significant one at that. I will return to this point at the end, but in short, the real world is far more complex than we often assume it to be – and binaries are a give away that something is oversimplified.
Structure is not logic
Small section of Wikipedia links by Juhan Sonin
Mitchell’s logic language describes how something looks and how it relates to other objects. For example you could say the wooden block is on the metal table. In our ocularly dominated world this makes sense, but I can’t help but wonder how Mitchell would describe Wikipedia if he saw it. It is tempting to describe W as a network of links, since this is how we perceive Wikipedia when we use it. The diagram for this would be like the one above, times about a million – a super complex description. However in reality Wikipedia is structured like the diagram below, pretty simple. I would love to think such a diagram exists for architecture, and we can get away from these verbose descriptions of what something looks like, and go into the true logic of the object.
Actual structure of Wikipedia from Wikimedia
Language is plural and restricting
Just like there are many ways to describe Wikipedia, there are many ways to describe architecture. Mitchell’s development of a language in The Logic of Architecture is not particularly novel. But what is interesting is his realisation that languages defines the scope of architectural possibility (the search space) and the best language defines all the design options we would possibly want, without being cluttered with the ones we do not want. So when Mitchell shows an image of Tarski’s World, I am blown away anyone would want to design with it (you can with this java applet).
But then again, scripting is not the most obvious way to describe a building. It is interesting to think of Grasshopper, and GC and Processing, in twenty years time, looking as clunky as Tarski’s World. I wonder what part of the design space we are currently missing by describing our buildings through mathematics.
Do it, don’t talk about it
Confirmation bias runs rampant in architectural academia. It is too easy to design a new way of producing architecture, test it on an idealised project and then extrapolate that you have changed the world. Or alternatively (as apparently happened at ACADIA this year) look to French continental philosophers as confirmation of your correctness. Had Mitchell tried to produce more than reproductions of 1:200 plans in The Logic of Architecture, I am sure he would have reconsidered his thesis in light of the gritty reality of real projects. In Mitchell’s time this would be a tall ask, but today, with so much of the underlying technology in place, there is not reason not to make these tools. So along with anyone talking in binary, I am immensely suspicious of anyone who describes a theoretical design tool, or one only tested on hypothetical projects. Thankfully Mitchell gave up doing this after The Logic of Architecture and just started telling us how the world was going to be – and Michell’s reality is not bad at all.
And with that, I think Digital Morphogensis is officially one year old, thank you to all the readers, commenters and twitters for helping make it happen.
Edit: 11-December-2011
Tarski’s world was mistakenly called Peano’s World. Thank you to Ruwan for catching this.
This is not going to be the most objective review of Jane Burry and Mark Burry‘s latest book, The New Mathematics of Architecture (Amazon)
, because I produced over 50 of the book’s illustrations, but hopefully this also allows me to offer some insight into the production.
Story Hall in Melbourne - Aperiodic tiling
The book itself has been under production for almost seven years. It was conceived during the 2003 ‘Non-standard Architectures Exhibition’ at the Pompidou Center where Mark Burry exhibited, and gestated while many of the projects inside the book were built. The key realisation at the time, and the key relisation of the book, is that computation is allowing architects to engage in mathematics without numbers. This revolution was only just starting in 2003, and now in 2010 there has been enough projects built that the thesis is no longer speculative or theoretical. Jane and Mark make this argument in the introduction of the book and then explore how this new mathematics is manifested in 46, mostly built, projects. The mathematics described is not your high school algebra and calculus – very few formula and no trig functions – instead this new mathematics draws largely on post-17th century maths, with concepts such as: Aperiodic tiling, chaos theory, developable surfaces, inversion, minimal surfaces and non-euclidean geometry. The book then concludes with a glossary that describes each of these concepts in detail.
Biothing
As to whether this is a good book, in my very non-objective opinion, The New Mathematics of Architecture articulates a major change in the use of mathematics. It is the type of book I would have enjoyed as a student, big pictures you can browse through for inspiration, but a lot of substance in the text. In a way I did have this book as I was doing my final year, I discovered Pareto optimisation while doing an illustration of it for the book, and ended up basing my entire final year project around it, so perhaps the book is already working as a source of inspiration. But you will have to make up your own mind as to its merits (get it at Amazon). If you have a review or know of any, post a comment and I will link to it below.
Glossary
By far the biggest villain in all of parametric design is Patrik Schumacher. Normally I would not give him the time of day, but since my previous post was such a fan-boy writeup of one of the heroes of parametric design, Robert Woodbury, it seems only fair to deal to Schumacher today. It also seems important to write about Schumacher because recently I have read quite a few people – mostly students – who have earnestly quoted from Schumacher’s essay on Parametricism, while at the same time – in closed circles – I have never heard of an idea more ridiculed. The infamous essay can be found online in the Architects Journal although earlier versions were published it in AD, and a video of Schumacher explaining the essay at Intensive Fields can be found here. Everything I could want to write about Schumacher’s use of the word ‘style’ in this essay has been said far better by Adem Mayer, instead I will take issue with the term Parametricism.
Schumacher is clueless when it comes to digital technology – I wouldn’t follow his advice on how to operate a kettle, let alone parametric software. At the heart of his incompetence is Schumacher’s use of the word Parametricism. Digital architecture has a very specific vocabulary; generative, parametric, emergent, swarming, associative, digital morphogenesis, optimisation, L-Systems, cellular autonoma, and genetic algorithms all have different meanings. This is not to exclude people like Schumacher from our club, but because these words are necessary to describe all the different fields in digital architecture, fields that are distinct and not always able to be clustered together. Yet with parametricism Schumacher makes it clear that he is not talking about parametric design, but of all of digital architecture, speaking of swarming and genetic algorithms in the same breath with parametric design. Etymologically, despite Schumacher’s protests, it is hard to separate parametric and parametricism. The suffix ‘-ism’ should turn parametricism literally into the doctrine or characteristic of parametric. It is possible Schumacher has taken the word parametric design literally, as design from parameters. Such an interpretation is a truism – there is no design without parameters – besides, the architecture from Zaha Hadid Architects that Schumacher uses as his only example of parametricism is probably some of the least constrained architecture in existance; literally deployable anywhere in the world, the architecture from ZHA is free from the parameters of sites, free from the parameters of culture, free from the parameters of tectonics, free from the parameters of the environment. Aside from ZHA, for a supposedly global style, Schumacher has very few examples of parametricism. In Intensive Fields he does show student work which he credits to “some students” – an immoral and unacademic credit. In Intensive Fields Schumacher himself confuses parametricism and parametric, claiming ”the only precursor of parametricism is Frei Otto.” Otto, by Schumacher’s own definition, produces parametric architecture (not parametricism), because like Fosters he neutralised the difference in his structures. I am not even going to go into Schumacher’s inexcusable exclusion of Gaudí, the Gothic, the Bauhaus and the Baroque from this history of parametric / parametricism. So Schumacher’s use of the word Parametricism is at best confusing, to him and even more so the general audience. It derives from his lack of understanding of this field, and is highly disruptive because people such as myself who are studying parametric design now need to go back a redefine what parametric is after Schumacher defined it for us.
Otto's drawing for the German Pavilion at Expo 67 (via: http://blog.la76.com/2010/02/expo67/)
I would personally define parametric, within the context of digital architecture, as a type of geometric model whose geometry is a function of a finite set of parameters. While a parametric model is a representation tool, I think that it does privilege a certain type (style?) of building simply by making some operations easier than others; you see the same thing in other representational modes, especially in student projects, people who design in plan tend make complex plans, people who design in section make complex sections and people who design with models tend to privilege the building as an object. But this is only true if the design is generated through this representational medium. So if I was to make a Grasshopper model of Villa Savoye, it does not make Villa Savoye parametric architecture, the generator of Villa Savoye is still very much the set square. However if Le Corbusier designed Villa Savoye with Grasshopper, then he would have likely found making all those orthogonal walls annoying and that the array tool gives far more impact for less work, in turn changing the nature of the project to embody some of the characteristics of parametric architecture.
Which begs the question, is ZHA a parametric firm? In my opinion no. ZHA belongs in a group, with the likes of Gehry, who are second generation digital architects. That is to say they are using computation to radically change the economic viability of their projects, but the design process, to paraphrase Neil Leach [1], is still traditional, devoid of computers, top-down and postmodern. For ZHA, a scarily consistent signature architect, the font of Hadid was founded long before they started using computers. Whether ZHA uses a parametric model to generate the construction drawings of their signature is meaningless because the design was generated through a different medium. So Parametricism in this weird double-talk is Schumacher’s attempt to associate ZHA (and even claim the ZHA created) a movement with which they have nothing to do. Stick at what you are good at Schumacher, making money, and let the third generation show you what this revolution is really about.
Well I guess after all that I am never going to work for ZHA. If you feel like jumping under a bus you are more than welcome to try to defend Schumacher in the comments, or if you just want to get on a bus, you are welcome to do that as well in the comments.
[1] Neil Leach, Digital Morphogenesis, 2009.
Edit 5 – December – 2010:
Patrik Schumacher responded to this critisim in the posts comments. His reply begins: “Don’t be such an ungenerous prick!”…
Robert Woodbury was studying parametric design before it even had a name – in 1990 Woodbury called it variational geometry and it was only later that ‘parametric design’ stuck. Many of the early pioneers of parametric design have gone on to do other things – or nothing at all – but Woodbury has defined his career by studying parametric design and in particular, how designers use parametric software. The list of papers he has written on the subject is a paper in itself. That is to say, when Woodbury writes a book titled “Elements of Parametric Design,” take notice. But take no notice of the cover, a bad Wordle design, the cover really undersells it.
Elements of Parametric Design (July 2010) is perhaps Woodbury’s magnum opus, it is certainly a labour of love, the cumulation of almost twenty years studying parametric design. The book is bursting with knowledge, full of thumb-nail diagrams scribbled in the margins and almost 300 pages of text. It seems to be written for the intermediate parametric designer, who knows how parametric software works and wants to become an expert in the field. Unlike other books on the same topic, Elements of Parametric Design addresses the issues of parametric design directly without getting distracted in circular philosophical arguments and without getting lost in the specifics of a single piece of software. Woodbury can do this because he has actually studied how people use parametric software, quite a refreshing notion in our research deprived and opinion rich culture. The book is loosely divided into two sections, one on his observations of how designers use parametric software, and one on how to be a better parametric designer.
Woodbury’s key observation is that designers are amateurs in most things they dabble in, and as a result, tend to “copy and modify” from experts. By this Woodbury means that designers have a tendency to fairly naïvely copy a concept from another domain, and modify it slightly to fit their project. So designers copy and modify mathematical concepts, normally visually, without truly understanding the maths behind them – I know I do this. Designers copy and modify other peoples code – it is interesting to see technique from sites like Design Reform getting re-appropriated by students in their projects. And designers copy and modify their own code – they prefer this over using more rigorous software development methods. This copy and modify process fits into a larger design cycle for parametric modeling: ”add, erase, relate and repair,” which is repeated endlessly until the design is complete. There are some other skills Woodbury observes designers using in this digital age, such as searching for solutions, delaying design decisions and dividing problems into smaller sub-problems. The key idea however, is still “copy and modify.” I am some what skeptical this is what I do, I find myself endlessly doing tasks from scratch, although this is probably the mark of a complete amateur.
The main argument in the book is that in order to improve as parametric designers, we need a deeper understanding of what we are copying and modifying. He dedicates the rest of the book to explaining how parametric software works, revisiting some basic maths principles and going through a revised version of his design patterns. Most of this information could be found in other places, but Woodbury has packaged it in a very clear way for designers.
I think the crux of the book, and where I think Woodbury might be wrong, is that he places the responsibility for becoming a better designer on the designer. It is the responsibility of the designer to buy this book, to read it, to understand it, and refer to it in times of trouble. Call me a skeptic, call me lazy, but I just do not see a generation of designers – who Woodbury has already identified as being under too much pressure to program properly or read the Wikipedia page of a maths concept – taking the time to read his book, despite all of its lovely diagrams. I read the book cover to cover and while I learnt a lot about parametric design, I do not think I have become a better designer, although I will be sure to copy and modify Woodbury’s observations the next time I am justifying what I do.
Routledge’s surprisingly good summary of Elements of Parametric Design.
In general I am not a fan of ‘theorists’ or anything else from the 80s. The exception is Neil Leach. I can still remember the first time I read The Anaesthics of Architecture, cover to cover under the afternoon sun, the whole text resonating. In the domain of digital architecture, even though it does not explicitly discuss the computer, it is significant because it establishes context for the emergence of digital architecture. This context of architecture at the end of the millennium is described by Leach as “Architectural design reduced to the superficial play of empty, seductive forms and philosophy is appropriated as an intellectual veneer to justify forms.”
It is against this Xeroxed backdrop of image based architecture that our current focus on performance emerges. I think Leach has articulated this shift better than anyone else, best summarised in his article Digital Morphogenesis, in Architectural Design, 79 (see full article here). The only critique I have is that Leach tends to downplay the role of the architect in digital morphogenesis, claiming the process is objective when in reality the architect exerts absolute control over the process – either through limiting the application of digital morphogenesis, or acting as an editor. In some cases this has lead to performance replacing philosophy as ‘an intellectual veneer to justify forms.’ Browsing the Grasshopper forum this becomes apparent, where project after project is rendered in the image of performance rather than being performative. In many ways the shift towards performance has been a fulfillment of John Frazer’s warning (issued in 1995) that computers “induce a false sense of having optimised a design which may be fundamentally ill conceived.” Whether or not the performance we are now seeing in architecture is ill conceived or intelligent, Neil Leach has been essential in exposing the trend.
A full list of all Leach’s publications can be found at http://neilleach.wordpress.com/ along with the picture used in this post.
Four lectures by Neil Leach are online:
Camouflage
Fake Gucci
Architecture of the catwalk
Intensive Fields
Parts of The Anasthetics of Architecture can be read on Google books
His article on EifForm in A/S/L can be read here on Google books.
Lecture notes given at UEL on Digital Morphogenesis
And finally his article Digital Morphogenesis
If you know of any other important resources please post them in the comments.
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