ABSTRACT
The notion of material culture relates to a culture's explicit expression in its physical artifacts and architecture, which in turn reflect the implicit processes of their intellectual and physical production. A synergetic understanding of machine computation and material computation enables architects to employ the computer to engage aspects of the material world that used to lay far outside the designer's sense and intuition, as well as engaging materiality and materialization as truly generative drivers in design. The Institute for Computational Design/Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design Research Pavilion 2010 aimed at exploring how design approaches for bending-active structures, which question the prioritization of geometry over materiality, can today be augmented by and extend through computational design, simulation, and fabrication. For exploring the potential of such fabrication processes enabled by sensorial capacities of the machine, adaptive 'construction' processes in nature provide a relevant source for scientific inspiration and technological abstraction.
