Soft[ware] Boundaries: Complex Geometry in Architectural Design

The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, 2018

A vital component to any architect’s education is learning how to effectively utilize building materials as carriers of architectural meaning; the development of a coherent tectonic language is fundamental to teaching architecture. This requires a careful understanding of the most basic components of architecture, its language, its words. The words are composed of materials, the sentences written in a building’s tectonics and detailing. Learning how to speak is the first step towards writing poetry. Learning the building art’s material language is the first step to creating architecture. Many academics and practitioners who are attracted to design build share a common belief that the materials and methods of construction matter, and are essential to an architect’s education. Latent in this line of inquiry is that if these elements are significant, that significance should be made manifest in the final, constructed reality of the building. This conception runs strongly counter to the direction of most contemporary architecture, in which seamlessness, weightlessness, and the suppression of materiality are ascendant. With these ideas in mind, how should an architect be trained? This paper will explore one method, using design build pedagogy to engage architecture students in a patient search for their own tectonic philosophy.

The landscapes of unfinished architecture, 2024

The unfinished architecture in Italy represents a phenomenon result of the post-World War II reconstruction, figuratively active in the peripheral landscapes compared to urban centers. The suspended construction sites often fall into a “building typology” that can be linked to ruins, especially due to their similar formal characteristics. However, it is evident that semantically, these two architectural paradigms, represent two polar opposites moments on the architectural timeline. The strength of the landscape composed by unfinished architecture evokes characteristic scenography of the romantic movement, where nature becomes the main character. This phenomenon has been recently explored using research, leading to a phenomenological analysis of the case, explored through artistic solutions, but without addressing the architectural and project aspects. The in- formal incompleteness in unfinished architecture guides the observer to discover the intrinsic potential it contains. This contribution aims to explore a design strategy that goes beyond the purely architectural aspect, involving social, economic and environmental components transversally. The landscapes of unfinished architecture reveal scenarios of environmental quality recognized in their bidimensional aspect, which, precisely through the potential of suspended construction sites, envision a possible enhancement. This architecture should be recognized as heritage, not only due to its substantial presence in the national territory, but especially for its ability to adapt to transformation. Therefore, this contribution explore into the hypothesis of considering participatory ephemeral architecture as a possible solution that can be applied at different scales and involve the input of the daily users of this type of landscapes. The heritage of the unfinished in Italy, in a historical context like the present one, serves as a testing ground for architectural, social, and environmental actions aimed at transforming and enhancing our territory.

CAADRIA proceedings

This paper explores the implications of complex geometry enabled by computational technology to architectural theory and practice. It reviews the different design paradigms engaged breaking the horizontality of the floor and ceiling or fusing them together. It argues that current advances in fluid dynamics simulations open a new frontier in the conception of the usable architectural surface, in which the architectural product is no longer a fixed object, but the interaction between a fluid, changing environment and built form. The paper presents a case study in which computational fluid dynamics are utilized to reconvert a disused breakwater into a 'blue garden'. The morphology of the breakwater and its texture are calculated to produce the conditions amiable for supporting a varied marine ecosystem, and to shape the waves to generate aesthetically meaningful sensations. The essay discusses the technical and conceptual challenges of controlling the non-linear behaviour of fluids. It then speculates on the theoretical ramifications of having the surface interact with exterior forces and the subject's imagination to produce an event enfolding in time..

Advances in Media, Entertainment, and the Arts, 2018

After nearly three decades since their first appearance in architectural practice, digital design tools are increasingly pervasive in nearly every aspect of the profession and throughout the building life cycle, from project development to construction administration to demolition and recycling. While an integrated approach to building information management is becoming the key to winning projects, the creative attitude of an earlier generation of computational designers is being quickly replaced by new tools and protocols geared toward achieving efficiency targets and boosting profitability. The author reflects on the evolving nature of the digital practice and the potential for a new generation of architects to resolve diverging aspirations towards creative freedom and efficient use of resources. The chapter draws on a few experimental projects by the author that combine traditional design tools with computational techniques to explore a direct correlation between building form and energy performance while forging a new vocabulary for sustainable design.

Conference: International Conference on Architectural Research - ICAR 2012Volume: Proceedings - ICAR 2012, 2012

The unprecedented contemporary expansion of knowledge brought forward a requirement to adopt a new mentality and a sense of urgency in bridging disciplines which, by the middle of twentieth century, gave rise to multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. Mankind has always used intelligence to address problems that life and society have generated. The same planet with the same resources needed to support the life of an exponentially growing population. In response to these requirements, the science and the technology have also grown exponentially, giving rise to cybernetics, mathematical theories that aim to translate the nature at macro and microscopic levels and theories that had the potential of being useful in generating new solutions in architecture. The emergence of computers, of digital technology, of complex graphics and visualization techniques streamlined the approach to architectural solutions and proved useful in satisfying both the pragmatic constraints that make architecture a science and the features that make it an art. This paper investigates the design of digital processes and how they can improve the thinking process at the project concept stage and the rethinking of the relationship between architecture, sciences and, inevitably, a highly technological society. Also present is a sub textual issue as to what extent these current trends are found in Romanian schools of architecture.

"The complex shapes and building technologies that are more and more often used in contemporary architecture remind to us that new tools are necessary when we mean to control the process from the stage of conception until the final realization. After decades of predominance of standard orthogonal systems, the design process seems to have reached such an high grade of difficulty, to require a review of traditional teaching programmes in architecture schools, particularly if we consider that even the simple comprehension and interpretation of some realized works requires new approaches. In this paper we intend to deepen the following issues: • what role can be given to representation techniques and to geometry,starting from the experience in some advanced courses given at the faculty of Architecture and Society in Milano; • what skills are necessary to manage the project and what techniques of representation are more suitable, especially when we consider that the final configurat...

2013

Abstract: Louis H. Sullivan is famously credited with the adage "Form Follows Function." In point of fact, it is a slight adaptation of the original expression "form ever follows function," taken from his article The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered published Lippincott's Magazine, March 1896. As originally stated: "It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law." The phrase succinctly reflected what arguably became the battle cry of 20'th century 'Modern Architecture' in reaction to, and rejection of, the historically ubiquitous and superficial application of ornament to building, a practice dating back to antiquity and continuing well into the 18'th and 19'th centuries. With the onset of the Period of Enlightenment, a concerted effort entailing a shift toward a "new and honest" architectural form, representative of an aesthetic more suited to the mindset of a generation now firmly engaged in the Industrial Revolution, was germinating. Philosophical positions posited by notable 19'th century German architects and theorists such as Gottfried Semper and Karl Bötticher paved the way for a distilled machine aesthetic, stripped of superfluous ornament, a stylistic manifestation that was to dominate 20'th century architecture. This paper seeks to identify the generators of architectural form beyond stylistic nuances, by tracing and connecting physical enterprise to its inherent roots, namely that of construction and fabrication, herein identified as tectonics, both from a historical point of view and specifically as it applies to the 21'st century and the proliferation of parametric, algorithmic based design.

2014

Footprint, 2007