1# EMERGENT FEATURES: Architectural Geometry
Part One of My New Series on Architectural Form in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Form follows function. With these three words, Louis Sullivan captured the essence of the modern functionalist’s ideas of architecture. During Sullivan’s time, the progress yielded by industrialisation was the driving force behind functionalism and modern architecture. Within this predominant mode of thinking, the strategy of deriving form deterministically flourished. At its mannerist peak, this idea even extended to a level where the functions determining shape should have been identifiable by the shapes at hand. The popular demand to reduce architectural form to its functional core implies that form is influenced by other factors. Furthermore, the sheer existence of such non-functional contributors to form renders alternative approaches to functionalism necessary. The deterministic mapping between form and function is obviously related to the parametric design of today’s generative design methods, so lets start there.
During the last century, the parameters and concepts upon which form could be based and from which it could be derived evolved continuously. While the initial idea was solely to fit form to a building’s function, analogous to optimisations in mechanical engineering, additional arbitrary objectives were soon introduced. Then, instead of the function as a system of behavioural patterns, arbitrary measurable performances such as sunlight exposure would frame the parameters form had to follow. Later, and especially in the field of CAM¹ and rapid prototyping to this day, form had to follow production processes. Although industrial prefabrication has been an immanent component of modern architecture since Joseph Paxton presented his Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851, recent developments in additive and robotic fabrication have reinstated industrial processes as design dogma. Thus, instead of the building’s function, the functionality of the tools used in its production determine architectural form. Furthermore, to fulfil even the mannerist aspirations of functionalism, “form follows production” also results in forms from which experts can derive the underlying production processes.
Finally, if thought through to its logical end, the market-driven industrialised production of architecture can only leave a single famous parameter for optimisation: profit. “Form follows profit” manifests, for example, in industrialised buildings which focus on basic needs alone. Such Plattenbauten in all their variations are not only a German or European phenomenon — this reduction of form to maximise profit (or minimise costs) is still popular worldwide. Not only in Asia’s highly densified cities, but in emerging cities all over the planet, this strategy is adopted to build for a low-income population. Of course, when profit drives function behind form, this is reflected in the resulting architecture, thereby rendering low-cost architecture readable as such.
The last two paragraphs should illustrate that the core ideas of functionalism have never been fully abandoned. On the contrary, they still play an important role in widespread industrialised architecture as well as in current avant-garde movements. The deterministic simplification, propagated by functionalism, of deriving form from an input is closely related to generative design methods in computer-aided architectural design, recently also labelled as “parametricism”. This field includes all computational methods of generating form by using computational functions with arbitrary parameters as input. By using such methods, the same set of inputs always results in the same form. In addition, the digitisation of this process opens another window of opportunity, in that being able to generate forms efficiently allows heuristic design strategies to be implemented. As a consequence, the parameters themselves gain importance in the architectural design process. Deterministic parametricism reveals a drift towards optimisation which is latently embodied by numeric representations² . Although there have been countless research attempts to construct meaningful parameters, these have only resulted in simplified and limited design automata. This is a serious problem, since purely mechanical design processes must eventually slip into banality (Habermas, 2003). That is, to situate the critique within the architectural domain: functionalism necessarily leads to purely functional buildings, excluding all considerations and qualities which cannot be quantified — rendering the quest for quantifying as many qualities as possible so important.
This is my first edit of “Applying Emergent Features or Architectural Geometries”, stay tuned for more.
¹ CAM, Computer Aided Manufacturing
² I have thoroughly investigated this drift in “Karten Statt Kurven” (Standfest, 2011). There, i used the actor-network theory as framework for interpreting the chain of reference in parametric design. Hereby the concept of drift as introduced by Bruno Latour described a way how non-human actors influence human ones (Latour, 2002).
Habermas, J. (2003). Moderne und postmoderne architektur. In G. d. Bruyn, S. Trüby, H. Mauler, & U. Pantle (Eds.), Architekturtheorie.doc (pp. 160–168). Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser.
