[Framework Post] Week 8: Digital Design.

In Emergence In Architecture (2004), Helen Castle explores the nature of emergence in architectural production. By definition, emergence is understood as a “complex” system of outcomes resulting from the interaction of “simple units and [their inherent or programmed] rules” (50). Often, emergence is understood as swarm behaviour, best elaborated by an examination of a flock of birds or an army of ants, both of which species have an inbuilt programme of responding in movement with members of the same species.

Architecture’s recent obsession with swarm theory seems to stem from a desire to mesh the various independent architectural systems and concerns together to generate architecture that is almost inevitable of these conditions. Almost like how humans are born with rib-cages that are meant to protect the organs within from exterior, and reproductive organs that ensure the continuous existence of the species, all programmed and put together in an almost seamless manner. Each part complementing another, and every one serving a specific, irrevocable and necessary function. (Well, all except the appendices, but that part will soon evolve itself away.)

What has evolved out of emergence theories in architecture is a host of organic forms and more importantly new methods and processes of generating design knowledge. As Castle expounds:

Rather than regarding buildings as unchanging, isolated tectonic objects, the goal of emergence when applied to architecture is to construct structures that have evolved through ha process of mophogenesis (a never-ending series of exchanges between system and environment), in which form or structure is elaborated to the point of attaining an ecology of performance. (Castle 50)

I hope this better explains why blobs are blobs, and why there’re more and more organic forms seen in your flashy architectural magazines! They are a result of a far greater project than just pretty form-making—not to say that pretty form-making isn’t in itself fun.

Although what interests me the most is if emergent forms (especially the organic as developed by the likes of Greg Lynn) were truly capable of situating themselves comfortably in our more traditional urban plans. So far, we have Spacelab-Cook’s Kunsthaus Graz (2004) floating as a green alien mothership in the city of Graz, although the architecture is supposedly a result of all the site conditions programmed into the computer. Is our urban landscape, or in fact, our urban designers who are today still referring to—what has been deemed an urban designer’s structuralist answer to the bible—Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language (1977) (now a website even) really ready for a departure for the organic?



References:

1. Alexander, Christopher. A Pattern Language. Oxford University Press, 1977.

2. Castle, Helen. “Emergency In Architecture.” AA Files, 50 (Spring 2004). 50-61.

3. Spacelab-Cook. Kunsthaus Graz. Graz, 2004.