ABSTRACT
Up up and away! Stochastic modeling can be traced to nineteenth-century scientic eorts to better understand the nature of uid mechanics. As mathematical models they evolved to reveal not a singular answer but a territory of behaviors for statistical probability. ese models provide a glimpse that events, mathematic or empiric, are not discreet but combinatorial and transformational. Each new “game of chance” contributed to the structured territory of observable occurrences and experiences in the natural world. ese models of ows, where one state of matter passes by another, were maps of the territory that the experiment sought to recreate. Fast forward one hundred years and multiple disciplines, not the least of which is architecture, now rely on many of the same mathematical models, or at least their principled underpinnings as the platform to proceed with the development and implementation of new technologies. e eect that this trend has had on architecture is that modern architectural thinking may have replaced modeling with simulation, which, from one point of view, the goal is the same, to recreate a likeness and organize information. We might consider that the map has collapsed over the territory where information and simulation illicit rules for design, and in this sandbox there lies the opportunity for the material culture of architecture to make a signicant leap forward. e benet of the collapse of the map and the territory3 is the return to judgment over interpretation – and the Wright brothers exercised theirs by launching paradigmatic technology; the eect of which was transformational change to the modern world, where accelerated transport literally collapsed both map and territory. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Wright brothers’ transition from two wheels to winged ight embodies the itinerant relationship between material knowledge, emerging fabrication processes and the human imagination (Figure 8.1). e Wrights knew both how things were made – and how to make things. eir ideas, rigorously developed and tested, were supported by rst-hand knowledge of tools and material; in their workshop there was no separation between manual and intellectual modes of production. Aerodynamic performance was critical for their breakthrough of controlled ight and performative values were critical to their process of design.4
