Mario Carpo

Mario Carpo, Computational Brutalism, 13 de junio de 2019. Fotografía: Juan Ignacio Palma. Archivo EAEU.

Computational Brutalism Mario Carpo

La arquitectura digitalmente inteligente ya no se ve tal como en los años 1990. Así como hace veinte años la modelización mediante splines y la customización digital en masa, transformaron el diseño y la fabricación, hoy en día la robótica, el big data, la computación de fuerza bruta y la inteligencia artificial de segunda generación están alterando la forma en que se hacen las cosas, la forma en que se ven, y la forma de pensamiento que yace detrás de ellas.

Computer Thinking

Computers are a new kind of machine, quite unlike any other we have ever seen. If we use computers to produce physical objects, computers follow a technical logic opposite of that of all the machines during the modern industrial age. We use computers to process information or to think, following a logic that is the opposite of modern science, the science of Galileo and Newton. Computers make things the way a good artisan workshop, not a modern factory, would.

Mass production and Non-standard Series

The logic of printing of a big press today and an old one is the same. A mechanical matrix, a cast, a mould cost money, and once they are made, we must use them as many times as possible to spread its cost over as many identical copies as we can. This is the logic of standardization: the more identical copies we make, the cheaper each copy will be. Digital fabrication does not use mechanical matrices, since every piece, when digitally made, is a one-off. As the reproduction process does not involve a mechanical matrix, there is no need to use the same form more than once to amortize the cost. No matrix, no copies. Making identical copies of the same will not make them cheaper, and making them different will not make them more expensive. Standardization using digital tools no longer saves money, and individual variations no longer cost money. The mass production of digital pieces is called digital mass customization, and the digitally mass-produced series of pieces is called non-standard series.

Digital Craft

Digital craft is the mass production of individual granular variations at no extra cost. These ideas were invented in a handful of schools of architecture in Europe and in the US in the early 1990s. Digital mass customization was an idea invented, nurtured, and developed by the design profession. It is so rare and unusual that it deserves notice. For the first time since the middle ages, architects and designers were not technological laggers or latecomers. This time around, they were the technical innovators, the pioneers, the trendsetters of technical change. We, the design profession, have been among the first to intuit the spirit of the digital age, and to this day, designers and architects are the best specialist of all things digital.

The Smooth and the Discrete

Can we look at two buildings and say: this building was designed and built using digital tools and this one was not? If you ask this question to any of us, the answer will likely be that the architecture of the digital age looks smooth, curvy, streamline. But if you look at what is happening these days in my school, the Bartlett, or at other schools where experiments in computational design are underway, you are likely to see stuff that looks disjointed, disconnected, angular, fragmented, or aggregational. All that was digitally smooth is

now rough, all that was digitally continuous is now discrete.

Fishy Fish

The spliney style soon became popular with many young digital designers in the early 1990s. They could not afford to buy heavy industrial software like CATIA, so they used cheaper and simpler programs for computed aided design called Form Z or Rhinoceros, or animation software like Maya, to obtain similar splining aerodynamic curves. In the mid 1990s, Greg Lynn famously introduced the terms folds and blobs to define this new digital style. Today many call it Parametricism, but if we consider the story of how this came to pass, these buildings should be more appropriately called fish. Fishy style is the style of digital fish making, as these lines or splines are literally and originally the curves by which boats and fish alike move smoothly in water. Accidents of History

For most regular buildings, the kind of buildings we use in daily life, we do not need streamlining. This suggests that the rise of digital streamlining in the 1990s, the style of the digital spline, might have been a quirk or a fluke, an ephemeral accident of history. At the end of the twentieth century, digital spline modelling, or digital streamlining, was old science carried onto a new technology. Splines were not new in the 1990s, and they are not new now. Even if we are getting better in making them bigger and bigger.

Discretism

I think discretism, as I call it, relates and essentially pertains to computation for one simple reason: it speaks the same language. Computers today are not much different from those 30 years ago, but they are much faster, and due to the shear, brutal, unprecedented overwhelming power they have, we are pushing them in new ways. Writing a neverending list is an equally never-ending task. But computers can work that way because they are fast. Computers are so fast that they do not even need to be smart. They do not need to learn calculus, as they will never need to use formulas or functions. For us the formula, the function, for them the list. For us data compression technology, a very short notation, for computers a never-ending list, because they can work that way.

Excessive Resolution

Starting some years ago, designers concluded that, as computers work that way, by enlisting and itemising four gazillion points one by one, that enumerative logic, the list log, the inner logic of what computers do, might as well be displayed in our finished computational work. This was the start of the style of voxelization, or discrete design computing. The style of excessive resolution. We see the outward visible sign of an inward invisible logic at play, which is no longer the logic of our mind.

Calculus and Simulation

Structural engineers use formulas to predict the resistance of the most structures we build. But could we use this kind of science to calculate this kind of structures? No, this kind of structure is too complex, made of too many different parts, and to calculate each small segment or particle in the traditional analytic way would take forever. Therefore, structures like this are not really calculated. They are tested in simulations, using standard software, computational finite element analysis.

Trial and Error

Designers start with a model of a random structure and apply simulated loads on it. When they increase the loads, they see that part of the structure will start to give way. When the designer tweaks the design, often randomly, obtaining a slightly different structure, the same loads are applied until the structure breaks again. After many trials and errors he will find, again randomly, a structure that does not break. This is not unlike what a traditional artisan, a cabinet maker making

chairs in his workshop, would have done. Trial and error, a wasteful and ineffective strategy when carried out in real life, is a perfectly reasonable and viable strategy when carried out in digital simulation.

New Science

There are two different strategies at play: ours, based on scientific formulas, which in turn derive from centuries of experiments, intuition, abstraction, generalization, theories, and understanding, and the other, the computers logic, based on data and pure massive brutal trial and error. Some call it a new science. It is a new kind of science, a very new kind, because it is not our science anymore.

The End of Causality

If we look at most structures designed by humans, we can tell why and how they stand up. The formulas of structural engineering are causal formulas. They establish a relationship of cause to effect between loads, forms, and stresses in a structure. Most laws make sense by the interpretative understanding of the physical phenomena they describe. Rational meaningfulness is visible in all the master pieces of modern structural engineering, from Eiffel Tower to Nervi’s vaults. If we look at these structures, we can understand the structural principles the designers had in mind when they sketched them. But if we look at the new structures, we do not have the faintest idea of how and why they stand up. Nobody knows it. Least of all its designers. And yet, it does stand up.

Future and Past

The best way to combine the technologies of digital mass customisation and the scientific logic of brute-force computing implies the use of robotic manufacturing. Only robotic tools can be flexible and versatile enough to assemble an infinite number of different parts. If, on top of that, we try to imagine how artificial intelligence may lever these technologies for robotic assembly, all suggests that a building will soon look very different than almost anything we have seen so far. So different that, this time around, looking at our recent past may not provide any hint to help us figure out how to deal with our imminent future.

Extractos de la conferencia de Mario Carpo, con introducción de Julián Varas, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 13 de junio de 2019.