Jonas Runberger

Full title: From Control  to Design, Parametric / Algorithmic Architecture, Tomoko Sakamoto and Albert Ferré (ed.), Actar 2008

This is a contemporary overview over parametric principles of design in architecture based on a number of practices (Mutsuro Sasaki, Adams Kara Taylor, deisgntoproduction and Aranda Lasch), also featuring a number of critical texts on the subject. The starting point, as defined in the introduction, is that architectural production has been rather unsuccessful at keeping up with technological advances with an “inertia of a building industry that for the most part still uses century-old technologies”, ”a property market that avoids risk” (and innovation) and the weight of historic and semantic considerations in the evolution of the discipline. This is set in relation to the automobile and aeronautical industries that through the introduction of CAD was transformed in regards to “gererative foundations and production capacities”. The recent developments within architecture is seen as immersed in ideological debates and severed from material production. The biggest impact of these technologies is identified as formal and stylistic research rather than exploring how the way architecture might be conceived and produced in response to “fundamental links established between information and matter”. The argument is that parametric design has contributed to “the definition of a new (less stable, more intimate) relation between technology and architectural production”.

The presentations of projects gives fairly detailed introductions to how computational techniques have been employed as organizational, structural, analytical and generative in the different practices. The essay Never Enough by Michael Meredith (Harvard GSD/MOS) problematizes pure formal interests to certain extents, and an interview of Jason Payne (UCLA/GNUFORM) by Sanford Kwinter (Harvard GSD/!KASAM) discusses the development of contemporary design culture within young firms in America.

Never Enough (Michael Meredith)
Meredith identifies recent parametric developments as producing the image of complexity, rather than managing to fulfill a rich potential of correlating multiple processes, typological transformations, parallel meanings, complex functional requirements, site specific problems or collaborative networks. Mastering of high-tech engineering software is producing architectural ornate decoration. Architecture is seen as a discipline that is searching for a unified organizational clarity (the diagram, the parti etc) as well as visual complexity (Venturi). It is seen as fragmented in need of differentiation, and in demand of social engagement. It cannot operate as an enclosed practice, and while parametric models offer another type of play and design process based on multiple scalar parameters, it never resolves what parameters are necessary for architecture. Referring to his own practice, he admits a strong formal interest, but emphasizes specificity in use, not as functional requirement, but in the dual use of performance (utility + theatrical value / relevance). Experiments in architecture today need a purpose beyond aesthetic experimentation, and a support from a broader system to avoid complete self referential exercises.  The discourse is seen as having been tied up the techniques of its own construction, not in its cultural social situation. It is to complex to singularly be mapped in a computer; not everything is easily quantifiable, not all relationships are geometric, and not all are to be coordinated into a smooth relationship.

The social-political dimension of architecture needs a narrative o f use, providing agency to form making, deriving meaning through influences inside and outside of the architectural object. It is dependent on synthesizing multiple narratives of architecture; typology, performance, material, relational participation and production. Exemplifying from his own practice, he suggests that an inclusive parametric process changes not only how we work, but also the relationship to the office itself. The office as a laboratory may potentially include both design of geometries, the workplace itself and clients/users. It is seen as an enactor of and an allegory of parametric systems. “Architecture can only be critical or difficult or meaningful or complex if it directly engages culture”, he claims, meaning being meaningful to a social cultural network. Technology won´t fix all our problems, their much deeper and human.

This essay makes a number of interesting statements, many of which I can relate to directly. It can as is often the case be read partly as a way for Meredith to merit is own work, but I still think it has a critical relevance. What he points out is an added agenda to the current developments within parametric design, one that puts demands outside of direct geometrical control. Between the line I detect an interest in the organizations around new design systems, also strongly linked to the way architecture performs in society (as both function and meaning). I think this is an interesting attempt to widen the scope of rigorous design method development, and I hope to find more material by him. I think this also can be related to the other branch of my own research; industrial production, and perhaps the efforts of modeling the processes employed. In both cases, the continued development needs to respond to demands outside of its current environments (an experimental practice linked to academia or a contractor´s process development). The text strengthen the importance of linking processes with results, but also brings in the performance of the architectural object in multiple levels, even if the reasoning is somewhat vague. I am considering this text for the Arkus publication, as one of two or three translated articles.

A conversation between Sanford Kwinter and Jason Payne
Payne´s reference to the parametric is more linked to design cultures, and partly uses the term indexical, which really seems to also refer to computational in different senses. Two branches are identified, one based within the realm of the image, in making indexical compositions and being linked also to the “image” of the office. The other is based on the effort to “get the job done”, and suggest a use which is more deliberate and intentional.
This work is traced back to its origins at Columbia University and the AA in the 90s, and further developed at SCIArc and UCLA over the past years. The relevance of other cultural production is significant, and references to music (Nirvana, Velvet Underground and the Doors), media (MONDO 2000 journal and Rolling Stones Magazine) and even drugs (LSD, MDMA and DMT) are frequent. Previously design cultures such as Phenomenology, previously seen as very related to representational work and distinct from the digital design field is recognized, in particular when Payne describes the transition from an interest in process to one of product, and a compulsion toward sensation, atmosphere and affect. Kwinter suggest that there is now a disinterest in concepts, ideas, theories and systematic in general, which makes it difficult for architecture to draw on ideas from other sciences of form (such as biology, evolutionary theory and genetics). Of particular interest is Modularity as studied in genetic science, as an instrument for understanding the emergence of hierarchical structures in complex forms.

This conversation/interview is lengthy, but discusses the design culture within the experimental design field in a quite interesting way, also in regards to recent history. It certainly is based within an American discourse, but also maps developments of more generic interest. There are numerous uses of contemporary practices and attempts to situated them in the field described, in particular in regards to from, but occasionally also to procedures and processes. The gestalt is considered importance, and a particular recent interest in the monstrous is given attention. I think that a particular interesting aspect of the conversation is the time aspect; Kwinter was active in the origins of the digital design field in the early 90s, when Payne was a student, and the discussion is really set in this background (which in a way is paralleled with my own, as a student I attended a lecture by Sanford Kwinter and Greg Lynn, which in many ways was seminal for the continuation of my own work). Still, the discussion remains in a field quite isolated from architecture as a larger field, and is linked to society through the references to other cultural production and the performative aspects of processes and results in relation to this, rather than discussing issues of form, function and the performative qualities suggested by Meredith.