The creators of this online journal and forum controversially argue that computation will engender the final stage of development in the relationship between architecture and computers by ...
Writing software is at the core of Casey Reas’s artistic practice. The digital is his medium of choice rather than a means of manipulation. He reflects on ...
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, the great spectre that once haunted Europe and the rest of the ...
While computers have dramatically changed the way architects design, construction in the US and around the world is still dependent on ...
One of the great lessons of the 20th Century that our particular generation of architects has inherited is our appreciation of the infra-thin scale: the primal ...
Contemporary telecommunication and computer technologies have fundamentally changed the relationship between sign and space, iconography and matter. While Venturi’s model for the decorated shed grew out ...
The current programming culture in architecture could all too easily be written off as a youthful, geeky obsession with the algorithmic and the parametric among nascent practitioners, who ...
After seeing Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion World Map, a map projected on a flattened isohedron, we began working on the idea of using computer ...
G. Holmes Perkins, 1904-2004 In September of 2004 I attended two events that reflect on each other. One was the Non-Standard Praxis conference held at MIT. The ...
With the dissolution of the last utopian project of Man in the name of Communism, thegreat specter that once haunted Europe and the rest of the world has all but ...
Contemporary architects are judged as much by their buildings as they are by the sophistication of the techniques used in design and construction. A certain fascination with technology is natural ...
Genomic architecture is based on the manipulation of the architectural genome. Like its biological counterpart, this genome is universal and encompasses all architecture — past, present and future. ...Genomic Architecture
Genomic architecture is based on the manipulation of the architectural genome. Like its biological counterpart, this genome is universal and encompasses all architecture — past, present and future. At its root, this genome is defined by a unified morphological genome, a universal code for all morphologies — natural, human-made and artificial. Morphogenomics, a possible new science, deals with morphological informatics. It includes mapping the morphological genome as a basis for generative morphologies that underlie the shaping of architectural space and structure. Once mapped, the morphological genome will need to be layered with other genomes (also requiring mapping) to cover different aspects of architecture: physical (e.g. materials, construction technologies), sensorial, cognitive and behavioral. Genomic architecture, based on the layered genome, encompasses an integrated world of “artificial architecture” (used in the same sense as “artificial intelligence” and “artificial life”), a world of complexity evolving in parallel with the natural world. It is a morphologically structured network of information that determines architectural taxonomies and phylogenies, permits digital manipulation of form in the design process, and enables mass-customization in digital manufacturing.
Limits of Organic Architecture
The meaning of the term “organic architecture”, which draws its inspiration mostly from biology, keeps evolving with increasing knowledge of nature combined with foreseeable technologies. As new technologies emerge, architecture becomes more organic in its scope, intent and realization. The upper limit to this sort of bio-mimicry would be biology itself. Buildings would grow , respond, adapt and recycle, they would self-assemble and self-organize, they would remember and be self-aware, they would evolve, and they would reproduce and die. Organic architecture, were it to attain biology, would design itself. It would also perpetuate itself. Architecture would then become “life”, and paradoxically, buildings would no longer need architects. Organic architecture, in this limit case scenario, would also define the end of architecture (as we define it now).
Extrapolating from projected technologies of the future , a scenario like this one is quite possible, even inevitable, but it is flawed for two reasons. First, biology as a goal for organic architecture assumes that such a biology (namely, existing biology) is frozen in time since it is based on “life” as we know it presently. Extrapolation of architecture from present biology ignores past and future biologies. Nature’s ongoing experiment comprises structures that are extinct, structures that exist now, and structures that have yet to appear. The definition of ‘organic’ must thus encompass all biologies: past, present and the future. Second, it ignores the creation of the new, e.g. new materials (new chemistries) not found in nature, new technologies not found in nature and new organisms (based on known or new biologies) not existing in nature. Besides new natural biologies, the term ‘organic’ must thus include artificial biology as well. This is where the line between human designs and those made by nature becomes a continuum.
Unifying Laws
What unites the natural and the human-made (including the artificial) are fundamental laws, the laws of nature. Our knowledge of nature and human-made constructions evolves such that these laws become increasingly more encompassing, tending towards the natural upper limit of a single unifying law for everything (as in the current search in physics, for example). Whether this limit is attainable is an open question. The natural and the artificial are facets of organic architecture that are joined at this fundamental level. This is true of biology and buildings. The morphologic possibilities within these two worlds fall within a single morphological universe governed by unifying laws of form that are common to both. It is governed by the mathematics of space, structure and form. When physical constraints (size, material, movement, weight, stability, building method or forming process, etc.) are imposed on form, this universe shrinks through the elimination of mathematical structures that are physically unrealizable. The physics and chemistry of form delimits the morphological universe.
by Haresh Lalvani
related : [Universal machines : Computational Architecture][Bioconductor : Open Source Bioinformatics][Metro Arts and Architecture][About the Journal of Architecture and Computation][Interactive Graffiti on Architecture][About][Pamphlet Architecture : Small Books with Big Ideas]
where are those diagrams from?