ABSTRACT
Affluence With the accelerated “informatization” of the human society and economy in the postwar period, architecture has engaged in an exponential integration of information technologies (Nora S. and Minc A. 1981). One of the consequences of this condition has been the emergence of an architectural production increasingly preoccupied with reaching a critical degree of morphological, structural and material precision. Such precision reflects the ability for information to intensify its presence into the deepest structure of matter. More importantly, this intensification of information affluences has augmented the symbiotic relation between the form and its function. Such a system is indeed increasingly specialized due to the selective processing of information that continuously modifies its very own nature and accelerates its evolution (Atlan H. et al. 2004). The architectural system thus conceived is endowed with an exponential capacity to absorb information assets while relentlessly combining them in order to guarantee its functional performance. Yet, such an architectural system is far more than a Petri dish of information bits. It foremost operates as an open system of influences that continuously reinvents itself. (fig 1)
Influence Considering the exponential capabilities offered by the information technologies, architecture has been engaged into redefining its modes of production and the nature of its expression. Following Michel Serres’ assertion, the architectural object increasingly resembles an organism that is responsive to its own internal nature and the external conditions of its surrounding. In this hyper-mediated environment, what used to be the collective gives way to the connective, the rigid structure to the open system, the condition of causality to non-linearity. Such an environment is generated by a wide range of information influences that render a reality in constant mutation; a reality shaped by potentialities, instabilities, and probabilities. Considering architecture as an expression of the human environment, the idea of a world shaped by probabilities is crucial because it implies that the architectural organism evolves in a non-linear fashion. In other words, its existence does not reflect a structure of cause and effect but rather induces complex evolutionary processes. In recent years, this consideration has triggered new modes of design thinking that share a similar objective, namely increasing the capability to reflect on a wide variety of generative influences. These new modes of design thinking include automated processes such as structural shape annealing mechanisms, genetic algorithms, and cellular automata. While considerably augmenting our perception of the real, the architectural organism renders a world of evolving phenomena shaped by unstable influences. The architectural organism thus conceived does not simply imply that new modes of production have emerged. It foremost implies that the discipline of architecture has marked an epistemological shift prompted by the current technological confluence of knowledge. (fig 2)
Confluence This continuum has radically transformed the nature of the practice. By embracing a great diversity of information and technologies, the architectural entity went from a static to a dynamic condition in the past 30 years. It now resembles an energetic system, meaning that its existence depends on the addition and association of parameters, each representing a potential condition for the reconfiguration of its intrinsic nature. Above all, technology has exponentially increased its ability to add parameters, therefore producing models that are, too often idealistically, qualified as “emergent.” This notion of emergence is often used to describe an architectural entity that expresses a formal complexity produced by increasingly blurred computational operations. And yet, the redundant use of this notion is not surprising in view of a contemporary reality that appears more and more unstable and mutable. In today’s architecture studio, designers continuously acquire terms and languages that are borrowed from the sciences. This change in practice does not imply that architecture has turned into a new science, but rather that its tools have become increasingly scientific. These scientific procedures have gradually transformed the deceiving nature of diagrams into computational codes that stem from the confluence of a wide range of disciplines. Associating the notion of confluence of knowledge to the design activity suggests that architecture can no longer remain an autonomous discipline. It now embraces the immensity of information networks. One of the consequences of this transdisciplinary condition is expressed by the current proliferation of new design activities in fields such as material and fabrication research, interactive and immersive media, and most noticeably, biologically inspired modeling (Linder M. 2005). In other words, the expansion of information assets implies that architecture is increasingly influenced by other fields of knowledge. Its concerns are no longer constrained to a particular dimension but instead
extend at all scales simultaneously, from the intrinsic structures of material to the macro-scale of environmental phenomena. Architecture stands now at the confluence of informational streams that generate a continuum of knowledge across all disciplines. (fig 3)
Informed Architecture: Sensitive Organism From Frederick Kiesler’s topological surfaces to Greg Lynn’s curvilinear shapes, architecture is offered the possibility of perceiving our reality in terms of behavioral and responsive architectural mechanisms rather than shallow images of reality. Described in his seminal article “A Home is not a House” the proliferation and specialization of building systems prompted Reyner Banham to describe the house as a “baroque ensemble of domestic gadgetry [that] epitomizes the intestinal complexity of gracious living” (Banham R. 1965). This analogy of mechanical and electrical services to systems regulating the living organism is striking because it suggests that the accumulation of energetic functions, as diverse as climatic, wireless and grid-based, implies the disappearance of the form, image, and representation of architecture as we know it. In this article, François Dallegret’s drawings for Banham are a tribute to this conglomeration of mechanical, electrical, and structural systems, with their associated requisites and interactions (Banham R. 1965). This vision of the house as an exhilarating skeleton marks the advent of a design paradigm of performance for architecture of life, energy and (de)regulated behaviors. Similar to a living organism, Banham’s architectural object emerges out of energetic streams, organic veins forming a unitary system of interwoven and interacting sub-systems which combine effectively toward the whole. Banham and Dallegret’s mechanical systems are characterized, indeed defined by their behaviors, capabilities, sets of innate and imparted knowledge.
