picon p59-114 eng
3/03/10
11:43
Page 71
metricism” as the new defining moment for architecture enabling designers to reach a complete fluidity at all stages and all scales, from initial sketches to construction, from single building to major urban compositions.13 If such a vision is certainly simplistic insofar that it minimizes the various technological and economic obstacles that designers have still to address in their everyday practice, parametric design makes nevertheless geometric complexity manageable. If “computers per se do not impose shapes”, they have certainly contributed to broaden the range of possibilities offered to designers. On a stylistic standpoint, the consequence of this freedom has been often assimilated to a new baroque condition because of the dynamic appearance of projects and the importance taken by deformations. Indeed, many projects suggest the idea of a frozen flow or wave somewhat reminiscent of the undulations of Bernini’s or Borromini’s walls. At different scales, from the modesty of the Water Garden for Jeffrey Kipnis’s house in Columbus to the gigantic West Side competition entry for New York, the architecture of Jesse Reiser and Nakano Umemoto provides various examples of the frozen flow concept. Other digital productions
13 Patrik Schumacher, “Parametricism as Style – Parametricist Manifesto”, 2008, http://www.patrikschumacher.com/Texts/Parametricism%20as%20Style.htm (visited on 20 January 2009).
71
Jesse Reiser + Nakano Umemoto, West Side Convergence competition entry, New York, 1999. RUR.