Theoretical Discourse on Digital Architecture & Technology

Brent Allpress, "Surface Values"in AR: Digital Architecture
Andrew Benjamin (Guest Editor)
Andrew MacKenzie (Editor)
Architecture Review Australia
Special Issue, no. 90, September 2004

(Key ideas in Allpress' text we were inspired by, are outlined in yellow)

>>>Digital technologies have developed rapidly across a broad range of creative industries in the past decade. The impact on the architectural discipline has been pervasive but uneven. The term “digital architecture” presents obstacles for any clear or shared definition. The diversity of different approaches to the adoption and adaptation of the technology currently encompasses “virtual space” modeling, digital drawing and modeling as a documentation tool, digital rendering as a communication medium, digital representation as a component of a generative design process, and digitally-controlled manufacturing as a new mode of materialisation and post-industrial production.

To date, digital technology has mostly manifested in architecture through shifts in modes of architectural representation and drawing. This began in the 1980’s with the development of Computer Aided Design (CAD), which introduced high levels of efficiency in the management of the documentation of buildings. No representational system is neutral. CAD is primarily an orthogonal Cartesian modeling system that operates with and in relation to x, y and z co-ordinates. A tendency remains for this means of drawing to promote a certain limited instrumental Cartesian spatial thinking as a default.

Most CAD packages are primarily effective documentation tools, but are not particularly flexible as a generative design medium. The adoption by architects of improvisatory modeling and rendering software intended for 3D animation applications promised a more significant shift in design practices in the late-nineties. The iterative form-generating capacity of this software mapped all too readily onto an existing American academic bias towards abstract formal compositional methodologies. A pre-digital lineage is readily traceable from Greg Lynn’s recent concretized diagrammatic buildings back to Peter Eisenman’s 1970’s and 1980’s projects that involved analogous methodical formal displacements of autonomously generated diagrammatic geometries.

Local practices such as Melbourne-based Ashton Raggatt MacDougall (ARM) have explored a more operative generative role for this 3D modeling software in projects such as the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra. Modeling operations such as Boolean subtraction and extrusion enable formally ambiguous and spatially complex outcomes to be achieved by highly efficient and direct representational operations such as the direct excision of one complex form from another to gain the negative void figure of the giant knot in the NMA Great Hall. ARM’s attitude to this technology is opportunistic and resourceful. Cheap packaging software was used to unfold the complex 3D figures into buildable cladding surfaces. The generative process allows for a qualitative outcome to be achieved that could not be readily achieved otherwise.

The relationship between digital representation and materialisation has become a significant emerging practice and research question. The recent adoption of parametric modeling software such as CATIA gives digital representations of architecture a different status. This technology was initially trialed by Ghery’s office on the Bilbao Guggenheim project, and is currently being used extensively by researchers and students working with Innovation Professor Mark Burry at the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (SIAL) at RMIT in Melbourne. A parametric model sets up a series of parameters for the design that are both calculable and alterable. Relationship rules can be established between elements where a change to one component causes a corresponding change to another. The process of design development and articulation no longer involves shifting from a malleable generative medium to a more rigid and instrumental documentation medium. The mutable parametric model is already compatible with digitally-controlled manufacturing machinery. Design generation, design development and manufacturing production can potentially be brought into an intimate dialogue.

Modernist architectural theory forced a conflation between the efficient economies of scale of standardised mass-production and the reductive aesthetic of modernist architectural composition. Walter Gropius called for a new mass-produced aesthetic of primary forms and colours that were universally legible to all regardless of culture or context.(1) Significant shifts have begun to occur in the technological and economic constraints of architectural prefabrication through the introduction of computer-aided architectural representation and digitally controlled manufacturing production processes such as Computer Aided Design Computer Aided Manufacturing (CADCAM) and robotic laser cutting. Prefabricated components can potentially be mass-produced with variable or differentiated configurations without significant extra cost. These technological developments have design implications that cannot be adequately accounted for solely in technical terms. Developing compositional criteria for prefabricated differentiation is an emerging design problematic.

Melbourne architect and RMIT academic Shane Murray has nominated this as one of the key research questions he has addressed in his PhD by Project that was publicly exhibited in May of this year. Murray argues that Colin Rowe was effectively one of the last significant architectural theorists to address composition. In the 1980’s, architectural theory increasingly drew on critical discourses outside the discipline and was often employed as an external authorisation of practice, not a theorization of practice.

There has been a subsequent repudiation of discursive theory by figures such as American academic Michael Speaks. In the recent work of architects such as Greg Lynn or the Dutch practice MVDVR, an empirical data-driven representational process often appears to have over-determined value as the generative ground or origin for a project that supposedly authorizes the formal outcome. The compositional procedures that curate the articulation of the outcome in the translation from scale-less diagram to scaled materialisation remain largely undisclosed and underemphasised in published accounts of the work.

Murray employed a series of projects as case-study vehicles for design research that tested an informed relationship between recurring design actions and a reflective theorisation of embodied compositional procedures. These included his competition entry for Melbourne’s Federation Square, the Cash Research office renovation and a competition entry for the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). All the projects engaged to some extent with digital representational and manufacturing technologies.

The Cash Research project is a small un-built scheme for the alteration of a mundane Melbourne brick warehouse. It combines a new office suite with existing prototype manufacturing facilities for a small firm that specialises in the research and development of precision engineering and new manufacturing technologies. The scheme thematises its program by engaging with CADCAM and laser cutting robotic technology as a design proposition.

New differentiated mass-production technologies challenge modernist assumptions of repetitive standardisation. Robotic laser cutting tools can undertake differentiated actions with no significant cost increase. This has implications for the conventional processes and procedures of a range of building industry crafts and trades.

"In this situation the traditional, trade linked restraints on material form are irrelevant. Stonemasonry, steel fabrication, ironmongery and even carpentry are both liberated and called into crisis as the traditional craft codes for their realisation have their physical underpinning removed."(2)

The architect is confronted with the possibility for "unique material arrangements at every juncture of the construction process."(3) As the cost incentives of standardisation recede, Murray proposes that issues of aesthetics and formal arrangement will take on renewed significance.

Industrial prefabrication was called into service by modernists as the exemplary means by which an integral formal unity of construction was to be achieved, refounding modern architecture as an autonomous discipline uncontaminated by previous historical styles or conventions. Without the organising framework of modular standardisation, the compositional arrangement of parts becomes a more overt design task. Establishing the criteria for any differentiation of repetitive modular prefabricated elements is a significant new design problematic.

Murray tests the limits of prefabrication technology as a tactic to explore other design outcomes not prescribed by the proprieties of modernist formalism. The additive nature of prefabricated assembly is resituated within an overall procedure of additive alteration. The existing brick building has been renovated through the layered application of a new half-mask facade made up of laser-cut steel plates with differentiated profiles. Alteration here induces altarity. The banal familiarity of this obsolete industrial context is opened to other design possibilities that redeem the everyday. The undulating linear cladding strips displace the frontal orientation of the original blank facade and actively engage with a more oblique marginal street view. The operation of laser-cutting is given figurative expression in the composition of the windows as abstract cut-out void figures that cut across the facade bands, projecting forth or receding back from the street view. The existing walls are rendered with the over-scaled name of the company as a recessed figure that is barely legible, with text acting more as ornamental surface texture. The postmodern conception of the ornamental facade as a signage that conveys meaning is confounded and problematised by this layered masquerade.

This project takes key compositional moves from Murray’s Federation Square project as found figures and knowingly reworks them in this other scale context as a focused test of compositional criteria when curating the articulation of non-standardised material elements. They are judged for their actions not their origins. His GOMA competition entry subsequently reworks these procedures at a civic scale where inevitable shifts in the museum brief would be accommodated by the compositionally mutable and flexible approach to the design development of the framing envelope.

Accounts of “digital architecture” need to move beyond the promotion of a nostalgia for the future. The rhetoric in the 1990’s that the new digital economy will supercede the old industrial economy is now more moderated and nuanced. Old debates about design, industrial production and making are taking on renewed relevance. The relationship between emerging digital technologies and techniques and existing, supposedly anachronistic disciplinary practices is becoming an increasingly productive area of enquiry.


1. Walter Gropius, "Principles of Bauhaus production (Dessau)," in Programs and manifestoes on 20th-century architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971, p. 95.
2. Shane Murray, "Cash Research," in Transition 54/55, (1997): 87.
3. ibid.


This article was published in:

Brent Allpress, "Surface Values", in AR: Digital Architecture, Andrew Benjamin (Guest Editor), Andrew MacKenzie (Editor), Architecture Review Australia, Special Issue, no. 90, September 2004

Juhani Pallasma - The Eyes of the Skin ' Architecture and the Senses'

Pallasma argues that there is a bias toward vision in architecture, and a tendency for present architecture to be conceived and taught of as a visionary subject, rather than relating to the other senses, or being sensory. Pallasma has an indepth interest in the senses, and the notion of hapticity, the tactile sense of experiencing the world by being in it. "The body is the locus of perception, thought and consciousness". He expresses concern for the way architecture is perceived and taught, and that life-enhancing architecture, must stimulate all the senses, particularly the skin, and not just be visually seductive. If this occurred, then our sense of experiencing the world, would be strengthened through our architecture and it would be the very representation of meaning. Significant architect, in fact, is beyond meaning, it directs our consciousness back to the world and toward a sense of 'being'.

We share a similar concern to Pallasma that digital representation, whilst being visually appealing, is limited in sensual or meaningful interpretation. There is a strong argument to suggest there has been a loss of criticality in architecture, since the advent of digital technology in the architectural field in the 1980s. Our use of Pallasma's book in experiment three, is to anchor our digital experimentation so that it may become more meaningful than simply 'form generation' in 3D Max. Rather, through the use of an underlying metaphorical theme, predator and prey, or zoo-morphism, the viewer can 'experience' the architecture with heightened sensitivity, even though it is viewed through a screen.

Carsten Nicolai - interactive matrix

Carsten Nicolai >>> "Identical three-dimensional forms have been designed to physically interlock with each other in order to build a repetitive surface. Visitors are encouraged to interact and create new structures.

Along with it monochrome silk-screened panels are hung to the wall − interpretations of repeating patterns from which segments are blacked out in order to create a virus-like effect. Since the entire regulatory mechanism of the design is based on random personal decisions, new patterns are continuously emerging. modular re.strukt is a project focused on the notions of modular standardization, industrialization and self-repeating systems contained in the utopian ideals of modernism."

Matrix < > Grid

Grid < > Matrix
Sabine Eckmann & Lutz Koepnick

This book was instrumental in helping us to define a matrix, and establish the difference between 'grid' and matrix'. Matrix is defined in countless ways, from the Latin work mather meaning mother, or uturus, to the idea of embedding, enclosing and supporting, like a rock that encloses a fossil, to the idea of modernist matrixes, which act as a changing, immeasurable moving surface. The matrix introduces the fourth dimension of 'time' into a grid, or organisation system. It is algorithm based, and is limitless in the number of opportunities for new aesthetic interpretations. New patterns are always emerging. Different explorations of grids and matrixes are recounted through art and the digital world, notably Carsten Nicolai's modular.restrukt which became a catalyst for our matrix pattern.

MEANING of the MATRIX

What is the digital matrix and how does it differ to the standard grid? How come the matrix has so many different meanings?

Interpretations of the meanings and characteristics of the matrix

The idea of the system is also critical to understanding the matrix, and organisation and connection of data, particularly in an age of an astronomical amount of information.

Hoberman Arch

The Hoberman arch was constructed as the centerpiece of the Olympic medals Plaza for the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympics.  It was commissioned by Hoberman Associations and is one of the worlds largest transforming structures of its kind.

In the book 'Flexible Architecture' this structure is classified as being a kinetic geometry, every individual panel is interconnected and move together to retract the screen.  The eloquence and marvel of this structure in action has been the inspiration for our own moving tower investigation.

Geometry Introduction

Gometry is a universal phenomena that has become the syntax of our three dimensional comprehension. Dating back to the renaissance period mathematic and geometry has been the basic principles behind architecture. Geometry has been translated into the digital world creating a space in which architectural creativity can take place without the limitations of the physical world.

It can be seen in the link above the complexity of geometry that is possible. Translated from the two dimensional to the three dimensional the digital form evokes spatial qualities similar to those of organic architecture. Curved, flued space seems seamlessly connected as if whittled from a block of wood.

Jo this might be of use to you in terms of you quest to transform dimensions!!!!

check out the link!!!

'Hydrogenase' - The Future of the City?

A friend of ours discovered these provocative images and passed them our way. Vincent Callebaut's latest futuristic idea suggests a self-sufficient organic airship. Powered on biofuel produced from sea weed, it is an idealised inhabitable form that draws its inspiration from nature.Callebaut's vertical aircrafts could provide a solution to the growing number of displaced populations from climate change, in an architecture that is "subversive and fundamentally critic towards the ways of living of our contemporary society that we have to reinvent totally.”

The organic airship would aim to be sustainable inhabitable transport. Perhaps this is the skyscraper of the future? Wouldn't this bring a new level of flexibility and dynamism to the urban skyline?!

We couldn't resist but to share this with everybody, because for a few minutes there we were in la la land, dreaming of the possibilities of flying towers...till we came crashing back to earth that is the present!

Flexible; Architecture That Responds to Change Robert Kronenburg

Robert Kronenburg suggests flexible architecture is not a new concept, but rather it is a form of building that has evolved alongside humankind's developments. Flexible buildings 'respond to changing situations in their use, operation or location.' This book explores the culture context of flexible architecture and gives an overview of its history as a building genre, before offering key contemporary examples of flexible architecture that may help in the creation of a new language of flexible architecture.

Most usefully, it provides four key characteristics of flexible architecture that organise the second part of this book. These are adaption, transformation, movability and interaction. Buildings that 'adapt' might be designed to adjust or change to different functions, or known as 'Open Building' - a term that originated in the 1960s by John Habraken to support a new concept of design as a continuous process and supporting the probability of future change. Buildings that 'transform' change shape space or form through physical alterations. Buildings that 'move' include buildings that relocate; shift, flies, floats. Buildings that 'interact' respond to the user; they might use sensors to induce change.

From this, it is important to recognise that most flexible architecture can be categorised by more than one characteristic. In particular, we have looked at OMA's Seattle Public Library for its concept on 'fluctuating space'. Here, OMA created a series of spatial compartments , each dedicated to a particular role of the library. Each offer flexibility within its own compartment, but the problems arising from different building functions are removed, through their separation. It is a successful division of space, as each floor has a different character, based on its function. What becomes important too, is the space between the floors where the 'interaction' occurs between the different floor activities.

Is this the way of the future or what?!

http://www.andrewmarsh.com/scripts/educational/simple-parametric-modelling-experiment

This is the most amazing interactive parametric modeling component we have seen yet!!! It uses java processing to enable realtime interaction by the users.

Its a bit touchy but maybe our internet is just slow

Drawings, Models & Digital Media

Frascari acknowledges that value-laden tools of representation underlie the conception and realisation of architecture. Drawings, prints, models, photographs and computer graphics and suggests that new ways of exploring representation stimulus from digital media provides alternatives to the ideological stagnation plaguing architectural creating.

“During the last two decades, the seductive potential of virtual space has expanded beyond all expectations, through both technological breakthroughs and artistic endeavours, yet the architectural profession is still reluctant to question certain fundamental premises concerning the transparency and homogeneity of its means of representation.”

Analogical thinking is a key element when deciphering architectural drawings and models being the materialization of fluid visible thoughts. By nature drawings make sensory conjunction between feeling and seeing and architectural drawings are an art form, praised for their aesthetic value to poetically demonstrate the architect’s concept. As a tool of representation models act as a balance between realism and creativity, providing a link with the 3 Dimensional world, being a universal language.

The importance of the two different mediums working together can be explained through Piaget’s (1977) theory of two inextricable aspects of knowledge:

The first is the ‘figurative’, which is concerned with the spatial and physical aspects of objects, namely the ‘spatial code’ (Tallandini 2008, pg 217). Spatial coding is experienced through the senses and is associated with the physical model.

Secondly, the ‘operative’ concerns an object’s semantic characteristics and instruments for interpreting the information that is available, namely the ‘symbolic code’ (Tallandini 2008, pg 218). Symbolic coding is the representation of the cognitive processes of comprehension and interpretation associated with drawing.

The creation of new architectural space can be explained as the abstraction and then synergy of symbolic interpretation to generate new forms and patterns from seemingly unrelated information. The combined process of spatial and symbolic coding can be evidenced through the work of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid (Smith 2005, pg 227) as these architects work dualistically with models and drawings.

Frank Gehry commonly uses sketches to conceptualise his ideas, and continues to sketch throughout his design process. The initial sketches are fluid and expressive which generates a symbolic perception of form and volume (Smith 2005, pg 227). Gehry then heavily depends on physical models in all scales and highly sophisticated 3-dimensional modelling programs to accurately rationalise his concepts spatially, and to represent internal energy (Smith 2005, pg 227).

Zaha Hadid uses drawings and paintings to explore her design process from conceptualisation to completion (Smith 2005, pg 229). Hadid plays with the kinaesthetic of forms and lines. The horizontal line is interpreted as being at rest. The vertical line represents upward motion and the diagonal is associated with the dynamic action of movement (Roth 1993, pg 61). In the spiral house, Hadid integrates the line as a form within a box through the use of vertically ascending landings, linked by ramps. Her sketches show that the spiral is kinked to evoke a change in direction while the parallel lines that dissect the circles suggest a beginning and an end (Smith 2005, pg 229). Through the use of modelling and her further self-analysis via painting, she articulates a resolution.

Inspired by the concept generating strategies that Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid have developed we will endeavour to investigate our own unique process of a figurative and operative synergy. Through the exploitation of newly emerging digital media we will investigate processes of interpreting 2 dimensional media into 3D form and explore the implications this will have on our design processes. To initiate the process we will investigate the geometry of famous art works and convert them into a 3d representation.

As described in Karen Moons' book ‘Modelling Messages; The Architect and the Model, we will be using models as:

Informative; Of all forms of representation, the model is the only truly physical 3 dimensional realization of the architect’s idea, thus providing an instant comprehensible picture, and perception of the project.

Translator; Inspired by the twentieth century rise of abstraction in the fine arts. We will endeavour to isolate theoretical ideas and translate them into models, unformulated as architecture but rather as beautiful artefacts.

Advocate; High tech models are not always “push-button models” and provide a great tool through precise reproduction of a digital file, the articulation of precise details will enable us to explore the final resolution of buildability.

Frascari, Marco 2007, “Questions of representation: the poetic origin of the architecture” The cornwell Press, England, Wiltshire

Moon, Karen 2005, “Modeling Messages: The Architect and the Model”, The Monacelli Press, Inc, New York, New York

Smith, Kendra S. 2005, “Architects’ Drawings: A selection of sketches by world famous architects through history”, Architectural Press, England, Burlington pg 227, 229

Tallandini M. & Luisa M. 2008, “Drawing and the Non-Verbal Mind: A Life-Span Perspective”, Cambridge University Press, New York pg 217-239

The Image of the Skyscraper

The First Skyscrapers

From about 1865, American architects developed an ‘original building type’, the skyscraper. Innovations in metal-frame construction, the safety elevator, fire-proofing techniques and other technical improvements, in conjunction with rising real estate prices, led to their feasibility.

Previously, buildings were constructed of masonry bearing-walls, whose thick walls were not economical, and were limited in height. However, with these technological developments and James Bogardus’s introduction of the European iron I-section, the new building form emerged.

In Chicago, the business district was largely destroyed by fire in 1871, leading to a series of new high-rise fireproofed metal-frame buildings by architects collectively termed the Chicago School. Although containing pioneering structures, most were clad in masonry.

Home Life Insurance Building, 1885

Reliance Building, Chicago, 1894-95

A world History of Architecture, Marian Moffett, Michael Fazio & Laurence Wodehouse

The term ‘Skyscraper’

The word ‘skyscraper’ came about in the 1880s, after the first 10-20 story buildings were built in Chicago and New York. Somewhat confusing in definition, it is not to be confused with ‘high-rise’.

Skyscraper; “Colloquial term referring to a multi-storey building designed for human occupancy (usually for office use), the height of which greatly exceeds one or both of its horizontal dimensions.” (Oxford University Press)

The Rise of the Skyscraper

The skyscraper trend was quick to take off, encouraged by further developments in concrete, the use of steel reinforcement enabling large-scale structures, and glass ‘curtain’ walls, non-structural cladding or infill glass applied to the structure. The exploration into curtain wall buildings lasted much of the twentieth century, with improvements in air-conditioning and breakthroughs in glass technology. From the 1950s, the invention of float glass, made large areas of glass possible, and the repetitive grids of extruded aluminium mullions fixed to the structure, with supportive panels of glass in-between, became commonplace.

SOM's Lever House: early 1950s curtain wall

Bauhaus early steel and glass construction

The Commercial Skyscraper

Increasingly, the curtain-glass wall began to appear on commercial and institutional buildings. The desire to build bigger, taller buildings has been around since ancient times, notably in Egypt, the pyramids represented the power and wealth of the Emperor. In the early twentieth century, corporations built skyscrapers to increase their brand recognition. A prime example of this is the Chrysler Building in New York (briefly the world's tallest in 1930 at 1046 feet, 77 stories), but still one of the most recognisable skyscrapers in the world today.

Chrysler Building, New York

The Race for the Sky

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the race for the sky has continued. The Empire State Building (1,250 feet and 102 stories) became the world’s tallest building after the Chrysler Building, and managed to withhold this record for 41 years, until the World Trade Centre came along in 1972 (1,368 feet, 110 stories). Soon after, the race become international, with Malaysia holding the record for some time with the Petronas Towers, built in 1998, followed by Taiwan’s Taipei 101, built in 2004 (1,670 feet and 101 stories). This building held the record for the tallest tower until only very recently when the Burj Khalifa (formerly the Burj Dubai) was built in 2010 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2,716 feet, or 828 metres, and 160 stories).

Graph showing comparison of skyscraper height

http://www.dubai-architecture.info/BurjDubaiHeight.png

The Image of the Skyscraper

“More than a century of literature art film and new media representations have built an image of the skyscraper inside the space of our collective imagination.” (Scott Johnson, Building Tall: Image of the Skyscraper)

Certainly Scott Johnson’s idea of the present image of the skyscraper (associated with wealth, power and ambition) and his argument that the towering presence of the skyscraper has come to embody society’s unexamined notions and secret desires, are critical ideas to explore.

“Paradoxically as the skyscraper building type changed to address shifting socio-economic conditions its perception by mainstream culture has become simpler and more consumable.” (Scott Johnson, Building Tall: Image of the Skyscraper)

In addition, the book "Skyplane" explores the impact of high-rise towers on city life and culture. The book contains a number of essays from architects and theorists, examining the global phenomenon of the skyscraper.

Further investigation into the socio-economic influences on skyscrapers and society’s visions of urban environments, might lead us to understand why the skyscraper is embraced for some building typologies, but not others. In addition, the perceptions by mainstream culture of skyscrapers and the notion of consumerism and ‘building branding’, are further topics for discussion.

Noticeably the skyscraper is a subject that provokes opinion from almost everybody, and opens architecture up to mainstream society. It has become a tool for manipulation of urban form, exploration of new materials, and a solution to expensive real estate and overpopulation. It contains references to culture and consumerism, and provides us with a brilliant, topical subject for our final year research studio, and an opportunity to partake in the conversation and debate.