Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures

Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures

Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures brings together a collection of recent research projects and theoretical perspectives on architectural design, showing the potential of embedded digital design and fabrication methods for architectural desing as a material and cultural practice. Contributions come from academics and practicioners, including Markus Hudert (EPFL Lausanne/ TU Braunschweig), Daniel Büning (TU Braunschweig), Mirco Becker (Städelschule), Achim Menges (TU Stuttgart) and many others.

The publication is the final roundup of a research and design project that took place over several years at the DEK (Department for Digital Design and Construction) at the msa | münster school of architecture.

ISBN 978-3-88778-418-8 AADR publishes innovative artistic, creative and historical research in art, architecture, design and related fields. www.aadr.info.de

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Sven Pfeiffer (ed.)

Sven Pfeiffer is a Berlin-based architect and professor for Digital Architectural Production at the TU Berlin. From 2010 to 2014 he was guest professor for Digital Design and Construction at the msa | münster school of architecture. He has lectured and taught internationally and is co-author of the publication Wind and City – Climate as an Architectural Instrument (DOM publishers, 2014).

INTERLOCKING DIGITAL AND Edited by Sven Pfeiffer MATERIAL CULTURES

Sven Pfeiffer (ed.)

INTERLOCKING DIGITAL AND MATERIAL CULTURES

Impressum/Colophon The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

Cover Image: Timberfabric – Applying Textile Assembly Principles for Wood Construction in Architecture, Markus Hudert, IBOIS EPFL, 2014, © Markus Hudert

Sven Pfeiffer (ed.)

Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures

© Copyright 2015 by Sven Pfeiffer and Spurbuchverlag Graphic Design: Dennis Stratmann, Wiebke Genzmer Publication © by Spurbuchverlag 1. print run 2015 Am Eichenhügel 4, 96148 Baunach, Germany All rights reserved.

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AADR – Art, Architecture and Design Research publishes research with an emphasis on the relationship between critical theory and creative practice.

AADR Curatorial Editor: Rochus Urban Hinkel, Stockholm Production: pth-mediaberatung GmbH, Würzburg Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures” brings together a collection of recent research projects and theoretical perspectives on architectural design and fabrication, showing the potential of digital tools by developing their spatial and constructive potential.

The publication is part research and design project, which took place from 2012 to 2014 at the DEK (Department for Digital Design and Construction) at the msa | münster school of architecture, headed by Sven Pfeiffer.

ISBN 978-3-88778-418-8 For further information on Spurbuchverlag and AADR visit our websites www.aadr.info/www.spurbuch.de.

Sven Pfeiffer (ed.)

INTERLOCKING DIGITAL AND MATERIAL CULTURES

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD Sven Pfeiffer

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INTERLOCKING DIGITAL AND MATERIAL STRUCTURES Sven Pfeiffer

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1 | MYOPIC NUMERICITY AND THE AESTHETICS OF COMPUTATION Damjan Jovanovic, Johan Bettum

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2 | PROCESSING BRANCHES Christoph Schindler, Martin Tamke, Ali Tabatabai, Martin Bereuter, Hironori Yoshida

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3 | LANDESGARTENSCHAU EXHIBITION HALL Achim Menges, Tobias Schwinn, Oliver David Krieg

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4 | TIMBERFARBRIC STRUCTURES Markus Hudert

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5 | BEYOND MINIMUM Asbjørn Søndergaard

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6 | THE NATURAL COLUMN PROJECT Daniel Büning

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7 | STRAIGHT ON – GEOMETRY AND MATERIALS Mirco Becker

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8 | HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO MODELDRIVEN STRUCTURAL DESIGN Clemens Preisinger, Moritz Heimrath

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AUTHORS

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FOREWORD The publication Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures brings together a collection of recent research projects and theoretical perspectives which explore possibilities for a rethinking of architecture as a material practice in the context of the contemporary discourse on digital design and fabrication methods.

The publication is the final roundup of a research and teaching project which took place from 2012 to 2014 at the msa | münster school of architecture’s departments for digital design and constructive design, and also incorporates doctoral research into the convergence of representation and building in architecture. The project consisted of several workshops, lectures and design seminars for students as well as an international symposium held in November 2012, which featured many of the presented authors.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the colleagues and the many talented students who supported the project and to the administrative and public relations team of the msa | münster school of architecture for their organisational and communicative skills in making the individual events of the research project successful. My specific thanks go to the team of the department for digital design and construction, to Prof. Jürgen Reichardt and Prof. Joachim Schultz-Granberg, for their initial support of the project as well as to the then dean, Prof. Julia Bolles-Wilson, for her kind advice.

The project was made possible with the financial support of the Fachhochschule Münster.

The symposium scaleless-seamless? that formed an integral part of the project was organised and conducted in close collaboration with Prof. Constantin Spiridonidis and Maria Voyatzaki of ENHSA – European Network of Heads of Schools of Architecture, whose valuable experiences in organising the symposium were specifically helpful. The symposium was kindly supported by the European Association for Architectural Education | EAAE. Sven Pfeiffer

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3 4 Fig. 1–4: Images from the Symposium scalelessseamless? at the msa | mßnster school of architecture Fig. 5: Parametric Structural Design Workshop with Clemens Preisinger

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Topology Optimization Workshop with Daniel BĂźning at the msa. The workshop explored additive manufactured architectural components based on topology optimization.

Fig. 6-7: Small scale working models of the simulation results, were materialized using 3D-printing technology.

Fig.8-12: Buildup Process of two designs which were realized as prototypes from lasercut cardboard slices.

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INTERLOCKING DIGITAL AND MATERIAL CULTURES Sven Pfeiffer

v. in•ter•locked, in•ter•lock•ing, in•ter•locks 1. To unite or join closely as by hooking or dovetailing.

2. To connect together (parts of a mechanism, for example) so that the individual parts affect each other in motion or operation.

In the context of this publication, the term interlocking relates to both the physical process of joinery of building elements and to the integration of different parameters in the architectural design process.

Contrary to views of digital tools as producing virtual experiences that lie outside material realities, it emphasises the physical presence of an architecture made by digital methods and suggests that these new tools, integrated in an intricate web of mutually shaping relations between cultural and technical aspects, can lead to new and exciting ways of thinking about architectural design as a material practice.

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As one of the driving forces of design, the rationalisation of building practice and standardisation of parts have been accelerating the development of architecture since the early centuries of human civilisation. In the first settlements of pre-industrial cultures, bricks, nails and dimensional lumber, in their simplest form, were among the first objects to be produced in standard dimensions. These modular elements were embedded in a building practice based on flexibility and adaptation to local conditions and materials. As the cultural knowledge associated with building was passed on from generation to generation, a great complexity of joints and geometric differentiation of

these simple elements was achieved by the individual skill of the artisan. Medieval pattern books1 and treatises from Song dynasty China (Fig. 1) not only document the technical content of these traditions but are filled with reference to contemporary culture and the aesthetic precepts of their time2.

With the introduction of new man-made materials such as concrete and steel and of tooling in the industrial revolution, this traditional knowledge about adaptation to cultural or local contexts was abandoned in many cases in favour of mass production, leading to universal and cost-efficient but spatially limited construction systems. Under the influence of Frederick W. Taylor’s motion studies of factory workers, and Henry Ford’s promotion of the use of machinery for factory mass production (Fig. 2), the architects of the early modern movement saw centralised production facilities and the streamlining of the construction process not only as progressive tools for managing design and building tasks more efficiently; standardisation promised to eventually lead to a new aesthetic language for a new society.

The novelty of technology received close consideration in the aesthetics of buildings; the new architecture not only had to follow in method, but had to look machine-like and factory-produced as well.3 Although technological innovations launched by developments in the military sector, such as numerically-controlled cutting (CNC) after World War Two, extended the possibilities to design and fabricate, the under-

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Fig. 1: Depiction of a Bracketing System, Yingzao Fashi, 1103 Fig. 2: Automobile production line, Ford, 1913

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There emerges the need for a new social initiative which is not another function or specialization but is an integral of the sum of the product of all specializations, that is, the Comprehensive Designer.5

lying dominance of standardised building parts, mass produced in response to highly specified requirements, had persisted in building culture after World War II4.

However, this paradigm has been repeatedly challenged in the twentieth century by visionary research into non-standardised building. Pioneers like Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Le Ricolais, and others introduced scientific rigour to the design process and thus opened up a new world for architecture by studying the adaptivity and self-organisational principles of natural processes.

Their observations led to new holistic approaches which, though they may not have entered mainstream building construction, nevertheless continue to serve as a reference for many of the researchers who have contributed to this publication.

Towards a contextual performance More recently, sophisticated computational technologies such as 3D scanning, simulation tools and digital fabrication have facilitated the control of the complex relationships between form and construction in their full three-dimensionality, pushing the boundaries of the buildable. In parallel with massive progress in the material sciences, a system-based understanding of these tools has initiated a change of awareness towards standardisation, but also towards environmental concerns. The recent terms

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‘performative’ and ‘performance-oriented’ design describe tendencies in research to move away from architecture’s fixation with objects towards the ability to incorporate various requirements, such as programmatic, structural and environmental aspects, into responsive systems. Performance in this sense is not an inherent property of a material, product or system, but a value related to a specific context. Instead of a merely technical optimisation of the performance of a building part, these design approaches conceive architectural production as an active agency which creates a direct and dynamic relationship between human needs, spatial and material organisation and the environment.6 The last decades of research on computational tools in architecture have yielded a host of innovations, trials and errors, accompanied by sometimes heated popular and academic discourse. But even though these new ways of working are still at an early stage, and many problems such as the social and environmental implications of the new technology7 are still waiting to be fully addressed in the discourse, the huge potential of combining computational tools and fabrication in architectural design tasks of ever-increasing complexity is obvious.

A historical view on the deep relationship between architecture and technology

shows that a new technological paradigm never completely replaces the previous one, but leads to a displacement which provides a new frame of reference, new expectations and a new consciousness. Thinking carefully about the characteristics of the current technological possibilities, the underlying historical and cultural conditions and their environmental impact could lead to a fuller activation of their potential. Rather than limiting ourselves to a conventional view, of seeing the new possibilities as mere extensions of the designer’s hands, a deeper collaboration with the ‘potential otherness’

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of these tools8 could lead to the creation of truly new and unseen spaces as well as sustainable building processes. As computation becomes an integrated part of our daily routines, the future will see a greater understanding of the design of interactive systems between bits and atoms that allow us to think of architecture in both real and virtual space. The new immediacy between design and building will hopefully lead to a more significant role for the architect of the future as a critical designer of processes and interfaces between the physical and the virtual rather than as one of form alone.

Barnes, Carl F., Villard de Honnecourt – The artist and his drawings: a critical bibliography, Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Feng, Jiren, Chinese Architecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the ‘Yingzao Fashi’ Building Manual. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012.

Banham, R. Theory and Design in the first Mach¬ine Age. Architectural Press, London, 1960.

The most characteristic indicator of the state of construction technology today is a trend toward systematic improvement of existing achievements, rather than a search for new, radical discoveries and inventions: this incremental change involves simplification of production, standardization, economization, and, above all, greater exploitation of human resources, which do not require additional capital investments. In Teige, Karel ; Dluhosch, Eric: The Minimum Dwelling. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

Fuller, R. B. , Ideas and Integrities. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010 [1963].

Hensel, Michael U., Performance-oriented Architecture: An Integrated Discourse and Theoretical Framework for Architectural Design and Sustainability Towards Non-discrete and Non-anthropocentric Architectures.

University of Reading, 2012. http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/03/how-sustainable-is-digital-fabrication.html Picon, Antoine, Robots and Architecture: Experiments, Fiction, Epistemology. In: Made by Robots : Challenging Architecture at a Larger Scale. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTIONS Research into digital design and fabrication techniques in architecture has been established worldwide as an academic discipline and the forms and applications it has taken on are intensely discussed in academic circles. The collection of essays presented in this publication attempts to give an overview over the variety of different formats and constituents of this new agenda to a broader audience in architecture and related fields. However heterogeneous the individual approaches might be, the contributions are unified by an understanding of technological progress in digital design and fabrication as not an end in itself but as enabler of a dynamic system of relationships between the design and making of architecture and its various material, cultural, historic and scientific contexts.

The first contribution by Damjan Jovanovic and Johan Bettum reflects on the changing position of the architect in a design process dominated by algorithmic design and numeric fabrication techniques. Comparing the current developments to the shift between the first and second machine ages, Jovanovic and Bettum outline possibilities of estrangement, which could overcome the smoothness associated with digital design and lead to new formal and material qualities within the digital regime.

In the context of this publication‘s theme, questions of reuse, the rediscovery of preindustrial building techniques, and of the regional availability of materials, become relevant once more. Christoph Schindler, Martin Tamke, Ali Tabatabai, Martin Bereuter and Hironori Yoshida present an approach to re-introducing pre-industrial building materials in their chapter ‘Processing Branches’. These researchers use 3D scanning technology to systematically explore possibilities of combining multiple modules of naturally grown and irregularly shaped wood, a material which has been excluded from architectural practice since the standardisation of the industrial revolution.

Utilising the potential of robotic fabrication, Achim Menges, Tobias Schwinn and Oliver David Krieg focus in their research on efficient and lightweight timber constructions, built from locally available and renewable wood resources. As outlined in the chapter ‘Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall’, these developments lead not only to resource efficiency but also to a novel and expressive architecture and a re-evaluation of traditional joinery.

In many of the research positions presented in this book, the production of physical models and prototypes plays a pivotal role as empirical test of the results of digital calculations.

As an explorative design interface, the physical model displays the material and structural properties of a design that cannot be encapsulated in a two dimensional digital representation. In ‘Timberfabric’, Markus Hudert works with large scale prototypes to develop an innovative construction system based on textile assembly processes. Here the properties of elastically deformable timber elements as components can be employed as a generative factor to develop a more flexible building system. Hudert shows that the interplay between

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material properties and assembly techniques not only contributes to the spatial and structural qualities of buildings but also generates a specific form of expression.

Two of the essays investigate the potential of computational optimisation processes, previously associated with the design of automobiles or aircrafts, in architecture in connection with digital fabrication. They present workflows for the design of large-scale additively manufactured architectural elements, in which the 3D model stands in a 1:1 relationship to its subsequently additively fabricated counterpart.

In ‘The Natural Column Project’, Daniel Büning presents an approach to manufacturing architectural elements using additive techniques. Introduced in the last decades of the twentieth century, 3D printing has undergone massive increases in scale and applications and is now regularly used to realise non-standardised building elements. Büning’s aim is to equip free-form elements with a three-dimensionally graded inner structure, using the form-finding process of topology optimisation. The tight interdependency between form, performance and matter also points to an enhanced manufacturing cycle as well as an expressive architecture.

Asbjørn Søndergaard’s essay ‘Beyond Minimum’ proposes another possible link for the coupling of optimisation and construction with digital tools. Søndergaard is heading towards a low-tech approach, based on a simplification of the resulting geometry for hot wire cutting. He claims that the sophistication and scaling of digital fabrication hold the potential to go beyond the orthogonal minimum heralded by early modernism, and materialise qualities inherent to the art of building.

The two final contributions to the publication develop individual design methods by reevaluating historical precursors of design methods using digital tools. Mirco Becker’s ‘Straight On’ describes a project which draws a clear line to the work of the German pioneer of free-form structures, Frei Otto, by exploring the geometries of bending straight elements to describe a complex surface. By using a material process and an algorithm that evaluates the geodesic direction on generic meshes, Becker develops an interactive way to intuitively explore the link between computation and materiality.

Clemens Preisinger and Moritz Heimrath address the fundamental experimental nature of the architectural design process with a focus on structural behaviour. In their ‘Historical and Contemporary Approaches to Model-driven Structural Design’ they give an overview of historic approaches to structural building design, and show how computer based methods can be used to integrate experimentation by means of physical simulation with self-developed digital tools. Looking at several case studies, they argue that computer-based physical simulation tools have reached a level where interaction with the digital realm is the equal of work with physical models.

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1 Damjan Jovanovic Johan Bettum

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MYOPIC NUMERICITY AND THE AESTHETICS OF COMPUTATION

After years of pursuing new paradigms of making through precise, mathematical descriptions of architectural form and by analogies with form generation in ‘perfectly’ made realms such as nature, architecture is about to be delivered to a new set of problems. These problems reflect how what Reyner Banham termed a ‘Machine Age’1 turned into a ‘First Data Age’ in the early 1990s and how the latter recently changed into a ‘Second Data Age’2.

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Banham’s ‘First Machine Age’ and ‘Second Machine Age’ were distinguished from one another in terms of the availability of technology to the user, its visibility, and the status of the designed object that resulted from and/or housed the technology. The ‘machine aesthetics’ of the two periods differed in that the first was characterised by need and the second by desire emerging in a post-war consumer society.3 To speak in terms of a ‘Data Age’ from the 1990s on, instead of a new ‘Machine Age’, reflects how the rise of an information society becomes codified through data which relies less and less on machines but nevertheless pervades every aspect of our lives. The information, the data and our access, use and control of it become far more important than the physical means we have for doing so.

Thus, the emergence of the ‘First Data Age’ in the nineties was characterised by how information and its processing – through machined and other forms of computation – took precedence over the machine itself. This change also bespeaks the increased importance of the virtual (that is, the immaterial) in affecting our lives. In turn, the ‘Second Data Age’ heralds how information has come to saturate our individual and public lives. Put differently: information, its processing and how we relate to these are all that matters. At stake is our active engagement with the information – no longer passive as in the ‘First Data Age’.

For architecture in the ‘Second Data Age’ there is no longer any literal or reified relation between a form and the different sets of information that make it possible4.

Paradoxically, while information is at the heart of this, the making of form has become liberated from any preordained destiny. Information must be channelled, like water, and there are infinite ways. The information-cum-data that is the lifeblood of form-making tells no stories; we do.

Hence, for architects it is different; we have to relate to this ever-changing sea of information. Through this succession of periods, what architects have always conceived of as tangible in the design process has become less so, since discrete physicality has been dissolved in numerical infinity, and raw information, virtual or real, has superseded representational form. However, resistance to change has prevailed since our data age has continued to be intimately associated with the machine. Computer power – which was limited in the first data age compared to now, was and continues to be frequently used to reduce and smooth out complexity. The idea of fabrication and the total, controlled parametric model persist. The alternative would be the computational, non-parametric model. Meanwhile, for most architects the computer has not been a tool that forms a medium in its own right, but is rather a means of doing complex things efficiently according to one or another inherited axiom. Thus, the question is not if the computer is a tool or not (by any known standard it is); it is how we conceive of, relate to and use it.

In lieu of efficiency, maybe we should have asked questions about efficacy. In other words, what do we really want of the newly acquired powers of machine-driven computation in architectural design? And what does the contemporary realm of the algorithmic look like;

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how do objects that partly emerge from algorithmic and computational processes look; and, eventually, what value do we ascribe to and draw from this realm? These questions, which now have become pressing, concern the aesthetics of computation and not the equally important but more obvious opportunities for rationalisation and efficiency that computation presents.

This means that what computer-driven processes till now have offered, the many reductive and rationalised forms that contemporary architecture so willingly delivers, cannot tell the whole story. It is specious to suppose that the current common practice of levelling out complexity, which continues the style of the previous two decades, is the culmination of our current interest in the digital. There must be more for architecture to discover in the realm of computation than the rationalised and therefore executable documentation of difficult geometry achieved by reducing it to discrete elements that in sum typically delivers smooth form.

Perhaps behind the calculably smooth lurks the incalculable that may produce an unexpected surplus in one or another way. The problem is well illustrated by one of the most compelling and universally known examples of human, bodily computation: the smile. It results from ‘a paroxysm that happens to the face’5 and has always, throughout human history, produced the most stunning effects: peace, love, apprehension, fear.

Here, the important aspect of a smile is not the underlying psychological and chemicalmotoric processes that produce it but its profound potency and the impact its appearance may have. In other words, a smile has a look that is perceived and processed.

It has an audience even when that is only an audience of one. Hence, a smile is an aesthetic proposition, something that comes within a context of ideas, a plan or a premise. To raise questions about the aesthetics of computation means not to settle for a myopic relation to numbers – numbers that give us the codes for and the medium of computation.

WHAT TO DESIGN, WHAT TO COMPUTE? From the early 1990s, computers in architecture became tools for approximation, compression, optimisation and simulation. Now, as computer power has greatly increased, there are three alternative but not necessarily exclusive future paths to take.

The first is to lessen the degree of compression and drill ever deeper into the matter that is to be modelled architecturally and used constructionally. In architecture this is found in the interest in minute details in materials, material systems and construction and exemplified by the avid engagement with robotic manufacturing pursued in numerous academic settings. The second is to superimpose new layers of data onto the existing ones, expanding the data axes in ever wider circles of information that result in bigger and more coordinated, though not necessarily more detailed, data sets. This is exemplified by building information modelling (BIM), which comprises software-centred processes for producing and managing information pertaining to building construction. The third is to occasionally abandon the compulsion towards computerised control, use data as

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uncompressed big data and let processes take their course, allowing for the hidden and unexpected. This last has opened up a Pandora’s box of strangeness.

In any case, the algorithm rules. It produces a computation that, when executed, proceeds through a finite number of well-defined, successive states, eventually producing an output and terminating in a final state. However, the transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic; some algorithms, known as randomised and probabilistic algorithms, incorporate random input. The algorithmic process relies on the syntax of sequenced operations and is computational. However, the moment these processes merely comprise the processing of information based on a set of explicitly determined criteria, they conform to the functions of an axiomatic model. That means we know what we are looking for. The idea of the computational as ingression of randomness into finite sets of rules,6 which is part of the third path that abandons rational control and control over the medium, resists this axiomatic function.

To start with, reductiveness and control are an illusion. They merely reflect a nervous concern with regards to some system of authority. In fact, among numbers – the ‘ultimate’ measure of a ‘rationalising’ and ‘optimising’ system – some real numbers cannot be reduced to anything but themselves, which pretty much means they cannot be reduced at all. In this case, the definition of the concept has the same level of complexity as the concept itself (as they are one and the same); to understand this concept, one would need to know it in its entirety, as there is no possibility of compression.7 The British painter, Francis Bacon, frequently threw paint at his canvas in order to reconfigure his subject and open up to unexpected results. He even argued that he would not need to be the one who was throwing; anyone could do it for him.8 Be that as it may, the point concerns his enlisting the arbitrary in an informal, sequenced process of applying paint to the canvas and manipulating it – a process he conducted, other than when throwing, with brushes, spatula, his fingers, piece of cloth or whatever else could aid his smudge in the best way. However, this randomness is not altogether accidental, even when it produces more or less accidental results. The randomness is, so to speak, calculable. Given the critical amount of it at the right time, a Pandora’s box of strange effects can indeed result.

Insofar as the relational has become synonymous with the parametric computational model, and the quest of architects has been to gain as much control as possible over this, another relational economy enters into the equation with reference to Bacon’s throwing. It arises from our acting within the spectrum of control versus no-control.

This economy in making things includes moments of loose and even no control. Hence, utilising computation to model the process as well as the outcomes of it and striving for total control down to every detail needs its counterpoint. This does not mean to abandon control but to enter into a far more nuanced as well as sinuous relationship with the medium at hand. One cannot command or control a smile; however, one can cunningly invite it. Momentarily relinquishing control, like Bacon did when throwing his paint onto

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the canvas, can be a studied process as much as a design process where absolute control of the computational is the objective. If there is a difference between these, it would be the potential non-axiomatic surprise of the former, its potential for presenting a surplus value in the process of making.

The relational economy that arises when considering control versus no-control involves the medium in which one works (which for Bacon includes the history of painting up to that point, his paint, body, methods, tools and techniques) and the protagonist in the process (e. g. Bacon himself). Enter the architect!

Now, the role of the protagonist is significantly different to her role when the task is to optimise processes for producing pre-defined, optimised results that conform to fixed, axiomatic models. The immediacy between the architect and the medium results in an intense, choreographed and fluctuating economy of relations where alertness and instant evaluation must meet with the occasional surplus to be had in unexpected results.

Continued critical evaluation is the essence of success, finding its analogy in the minute and ultimately precise and improvised responses of a stage performer to her partner. The aesthetics of this cannot be objectified, nor does it a priori pertain to the final outcome itself that is the object to be designed. Rather, it presents us with a form of consumption and a ceaseless processing of information, a performative act, an engagement with the medium as the other.

Given this relational economy invoking the medium and an intimacy in our relation to it, we have to turn our attention to what architects do. And just as painters paint, architects draw.

THE DRAWING, STRANGENESS AND SURPLUS VALUE The aesthetics of computation momentarily shifts attention away from the architectural object. The shift is troublesome, since centuries of ideas and discourse have accustomed us to the aesthetic evaluation of objects, not processes. Moreover, it is troublesome since the processes in question are invisible and sometimes beyond our control. To ask ‘what is algorithmic aesthetics?’ appears to be problematic; the view prevails that, in a computerised world, algorithms comprise strings of binary numbers, helping with complex calculations that are too cumbersome for humans. Meanwhile, aesthetics belongs to the realm of human values and disciplinary and expertise discourse. Likewise, to ask ‘what is an algorithmic object?’ seems to assume that the object is here, and the algorithms are over there, still invisible. In this view, the question amounts to asking ‘what is a drawing object?’ or ‘what is a CAD object?’

These objections stem from an argument with a very long tradition in architectural discipline, one that posits architecture as a practice belonging exclusively to the realm of the built, and drawing as a necessary tool that has little value on its own (hence the slightly derogatory term ‘paper architect’). In effect, this understands drawing as being

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exclusively representational. According to this view, with the translation of the drawing into the built realm, the object enters another semiotic plane where it loses all traces of its previous existence. This argument overlooks Alberti’s crucial insight, one that gave birth to the discipline of design: architects actually draw, they do not build. Also, crucially, this argument does not account for the emergent effects of the algorithm understood as drawing. However, the call for acknowledging the medium specificity and inherent value of drawings does not exclude building practice; it merely asks for the equal treatment of these two components. This position is, in our view, crucial for understanding the discipline of architecture as a cultural practice, not merely a practice.

The assumption, however, is that computation has a degree of autonomy, which makes a significant and critical difference to how we previously went about architectural design – and that this difference effects a major change, more than till now generally acknowledged. But if for a moment we abandon the conundrum that ‘the aesthetics of computation’ poses and shift our attention to the question of the medium and the economy of the performative, we might find the ground of a new understanding and access to the surplus of computational design.

As recently observed by Mario Carpo, architecture is not an autographic but an allographic practice9, meaning that the finished work is not a direct index of its creator but is always mediated and executed through a set of instructions. Historically, architects work within and with a medium to make representations of buildings: models, but first and foremost drawing.10 However, what happens when the problem we are addressing is no longer about representation, when the medium simply cannot be understood as representational any more, as it emits unexpected effects and invokes emergent semiotic content?

The role of drawing in architecture has dramatically changed over time but has always depended on architects’ involvement with the flat, usually rectangular and always twodimensional, space of the paper. Yet, architects’ involvement with a medium prevails, even if the paper has been replaced in large measure by the screen. What has changed is that the receptacle for ideas is no longer passive. Before, there was nothing on the reverse side of the paper; now, behind the screen, there is a process that can produce results of its own. The medium has become active.

Drawings (plans and sections) have traditionally been representational. They were and still are tools used to represent, fully and unambiguously, the coming reality of a project.

As such, they constitute a twofold medium: on the one hand, the drawing is a tool for design, a tool that allows for the unravelling of ideas transmitted onto the two-dimensional receptacle. On the other hand, it also presents a set of instructions, a clear system of notation for others to follow in order to build. Every projection for the future (design) has always been bound to this negotiation between a designer and her ideas through the medium of drawing. All possible outcomes depend solely on the designer and her ability to represent her ideas.

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In the second half of the twentieth century, architecture saw the rise of a type of diagram that turned the instrumentality of the drawing into a dynamic and operational medium.

This had its precedents, for instance in the work of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand and his ‘typological design method’, where Durand ‘attempts to establish a systematic method of classifying buildings according to genres and abstracts them into diagrams’.11 Another is Le Corbusier’s well-known diagram for the Domino House. The latter is significant since it formed one reference for Peter Eisenman’s formal explorations of the architectural frame in drawings from the 1970s and onward – and if any architect has contributed to ‘a sustained investigation of the possibilities of dynamic formalism’ and the diagram’s powers of ‘re-origination’, it is he.12 In Eisenman’s work the role of the diagram was to transcend the representational and constitute what can be termed operational; its graphic space became active, with a subtle capacity to construct unexpected forms that emerge from the drawing considered as a medium in its own right.

One crucial aspect of the operational capacity of this diagram is the quality of abstraction.

The further it is removed from a representational role the more difficult or laborious it is to relate it to architecture, but the higher its potential for doing something unexpected.

One way to disturb the stasis of a drawing is by means of juxtaposition, used primarily to show multiple outcomes of the same operation in the same graphic space. For example, an object can be drawn from different angles, and through juxtaposition a new, interstitial and graphic spatiality will arise. By utilising techniques of juxtaposition, multiple, unseen and unplanned spaces emerge, and the drawing as a medium is activated. The collage exemplifies a technique of juxtaposition, but so do many different types of diagrams that have proliferated in architectural design in the last few decades. So much the sadder that the diagram of the 1990s, as a result of architects’ over-eagerness to dictate the formal outcome, became denuded of its capacities to channel flows in the work process and instead was reified as a conventional compositional figure. If computation can do something for architecture beyond the hyper-rational and efficient, it may return to architecture a renewed responsiveness and recharge its capacities.

Insofar as computational techniques based on algorithms represent a new form of medium for architectural design, two aspects of these techniques are worth attention.

First is that visible portions of the algorithms will be accessible to us on the interface of the screen. In other words, in line with conventions, the drawing seems to be still intact.

However, on the ‘flip side’, the operational has been plunged yet further into abstraction in numerical series, dealing with infinities and randomness, which begin to affect the ‘front’ in unexpected ways. Hence, the location of the operational and generative has (at least) doubled: one engages the architect in front of the screen; the other behind, perfectly removed from us, in relations between codes.

The notion of a drawing becoming generative is not fully apparent in the use of ‘first data age’ algorithms, such as loft, swipe, or boolean functions, whose result we can

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anticipate. However, with the rise of advanced algorithms such as swarm behaviours, the organisation and aggregation of elements have their own dynamic and will always do more than a designer can predict. Now the ‘drawing’ generates the space. There is simply no way to understand complex algorithms and their effects as being merely representations of hidden mathematical functions.

Given the prevalence of computer aided design, any architectural object built in the last 20 years can be called an algorithmic object. Justification for this may be found in their quality as ‘aggregates’,13 which in turn may indicate that the architect’s autonomous authorship has been infringed. A shared or hybrid authorial condition helps explains why their formal characteristics are becoming more and more like the authorial model on which they depend: patchy, aggregated, strange. This strangeness is partly due to the fact that these objects exist ‘in a state of permanent drift’,14 which means that they are never fully finished or complete; there is a certain open-endedness to them.

Another thing to note is the sheer amount and superfluity of data that constitutes them: residual and leftover data, layers upon layers of excess information. We are simply incapable of accounting for the complete picture. As data overflows and overpowers our capacity for full, legible understanding, the need arises to construct a new vocabulary of forms and effects. This need comes about because the ‘new’ medium of design software and computation has and will have its own impact on architecture through its own medium specificity. The qualities of a specific computation will seep back into reality and become fully actualised real objects.

One such quality would be connected to the seemingly paradoxical question of digital materiality. Simply put, in sensory terms digital objects are immaterial, fully mutable entities. Digital matter does not exist in a tangible sense, but it still creates a certain sensory experience when confronted on the screen. If we try to describe this sensory experience pertaining to objects, we will end up using words such as ‘light’, ‘immaterial’, ‘hollow’, ‘empty’, ‘insubstantial’, et cetera. If we now return our gaze to the built digital objects, a sense of loss of weight might emerge as a possible description of their qualities.

For example, if we look at Herzog & de Meuron’s National Stadium (Bird’s Nest) in Beijing, even though we are fully aware of its strongly articulated tectonic envelope, we will still experience it as an almost weightless structure. Did the primal digital (im)materiality leak back into reality to inform our reading of this structure? Did the digital model/drawing, in all its medium-specific glory, actually get built?

In effect, the question is not so much about strangeness as an outcome; it is about the strategies for estrangement with which the digital regime operates, even on the level of formal and material qualities. There may exist a vast, unexplored economy of estrangement, directly influencing the economy of aesthetic experience, through which a whole new ecology of relations emerges.

The final argument for such qualities is strikingly simple: to think of experiences and revel in sensuousness is the only thing left to us, the only thing we simply cannot leave to the

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machine. After all, even if these days machines can read, analyse and cross reference, multiply and map all possible relations and outcomes of any expression, it is still only we who can enjoy the incidental effects of a smile.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

The ‘machine age’ was so termed by Reyner Banham when he discussed twentieth century architecture.

Banham also termed the ‘second machine age’. See: Banham, R., Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, But terworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1960.

The terms, ‘First Data Age’ and ‘Second Data Age’, are used with obvious reference to Banham’s terms.

See Banham and also: Whiteley, N., ‘The Digital Age: The Fourth Machine Age.’ Second International Symposium for Theory and Design in the Digital Age, 2005.

This may always have been the case. The point, though, is that our impulse for seeing relations, whether the singular and causal given by the inspired idea of the genius architect or the relation between a form and its meaning, is simply impossible given the amount of data at stake. That they may factually and culturally be irrelevant is another discussion.

The example and formulation are Sanford Kwinter’s in a lecture called, ‘What is Life? The Search for Models’, that he gave in The Theatre of Immanence in Städelschule’s Portikus gallery in 2007. Kwinter uses the example of the smile in his discussion of the ‘chreod’, ‘an invisible but not imaginary feature in an invisible but not imaginary landscape on which a developing form gathers the information and the influence necessary for it to make itself what it is.’ A transcript of the lecture is forthcoming in SAC Journal 2, Mediated Architecture: Vivid, Effervescent and Nervous, published by Spurbuch Verlag and the Städelschule Architecture Class.

Parisi, L., Contagious Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 2013, p. X of the Preface.

Chaitin, G., ‘Epistemology as Information Theory’, Collapse I: Numerical Materialism, Urbanomic, London, 2006.

In a series of interviews with David Sylvester, Bacon argued this position. Sylvester disagreed with him and thought that an expertise was needed, even when it came to Bacon engaging with the arbitrary. (Sylvester, D., Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1993, p. 107).

Carpo, M., The Alphabet and the Algorithm. MIT Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 2011, p.16.

Robin Evans has put this succinctly in his Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, MIT Press, 1997, p.165; also see The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries, MIT Press, Cambridge, London, 1995.

Lee, Christopher CM, and Jacoby, S.,’Typological Urbanism and the Idea of the City.’ Architectural Design 81 (1), p.19., 2011.

The citations are from an unpublished text by Jeffrey Kipnis in which he discusses the diagram.

Carpo, M., ‘Digital Style’, Log 23, Anyone Corporation, 2011, p.45.

Ibid.

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Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures

Interlocking Digital and Material Cultures brings together a collection of recent research projects and theoretical perspectives on architectural design, showing the potential of embedded digital design and fabrication methods for architectural desing as a material and cultural practice. Contributions come from academics and practicioners, including Markus Hudert (EPFL Lausanne/ TU Braunschweig), Daniel Büning (TU Braunschweig), Mirco Becker (Städelschule), Achim Menges (TU Stuttgart) and many others.

The publication is the final roundup of a research and design project that took place over several years at the DEK (Department for Digital Design and Construction) at the msa | münster school of architecture.

ISBN 978-3-88778-418-8 AADR publishes innovative artistic, creative and historical research in art, architecture, design and related fields. www.aadr.info.de

www.spurbuch.de

Sven Pfeiffer (ed.)

Sven Pfeiffer is a Berlin-based architect and professor for Digital Architectural Production at the TU Berlin. From 2010 to 2014 he was guest professor for Digital Design and Construction at the msa | münster school of architecture. He has lectured and taught internationally and is co-author of the publication Wind and City – Climate as an Architectural Instrument (DOM publishers, 2014).

INTERLOCKING DIGITAL AND Edited by Sven Pfeiffer MATERIAL CULTURES