W6 - The Lure of The Continuous Skin (TE2.3, TE2.5, CC3.4, C4.2, C4.4)

INTRODUCTION

Upon having an understanding of Parametricism through a week of reading, I find its relevance as a global architectural standardization for a future that insists on boundlessness. The exploration of seamless characters that can be achieved in form and space, made possible through computational synthesis, provides us a clear picture of practicality with the absence of geometrical rigidity, hence extending a whole new dimension of architectural interaction.

My WEEK 1 blog post discusses on the seeds that may have developed into the idea of Parametric Design, as well as the constraints that restricts Parametricism into completely covering all aspects of architectural application. From this discussion comes out the main Research Question that is of my interest which will be discussed on the next week post:

"To what extent can Parametric Surface/Skin composition contributes towards the complexities of human inhabitation?"

PARAMETRICISM AS NEW GLOBAL STYLE FOR ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN 

Zaha Hadid & Patrik Schumacher

Patrik Schumacher’s audacious claim in promoting Parametricism as a style for the global scale architecture movement demands our attention towards understanding parametric application in design.

He justifies his claims by calling for an observation of Parametricism in a global convergence in recent avant-garde architecture over the last 15 years and the possibility of having rightly claimed as hegemony within avant-garde architecture. As a new long wave of systematic innovation, it succeeds modernism. The style finally closes the transitional period of uncertainty that was engendered by the crisis of modernism and a series of short lived episodes including Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, and Minimalism was marked.

After modernism, parametricism claims its relevance in architecture and interior design to large scale urban design. The larger the scale of the project the more pronounced is parametricism’s superior capacity to articulate programmatic complexity. In a three year research agenda at the AADRL  - Parametric Urbanism, the urbanist potential of parametricism has been explored and demonstrated by Zaha Hadid Architects by a series of competition winning masterplans.

WHAT IS PARAMETRIC DESIGN?

The word 'Parameter' is technically defined as a numerical or other measurable factor forming one of a set that defines a system or sets the conditions of its operation. Parameters are the constants in an equation, set of equations, or a computer program (script) that define and limit what the equation will produce.

A video below demonstrates a clear example of how architecture and urban design process is applied through parametric approach, where a set of criteria determines the parameter of the design within which the design configuration is explored. 

Peter Trummer's Parametric Associative Design

It is clear that hand drawings and sketches can only contribute towards the visual and physical representation of initial ideas. Since the only possible method of achieving parametric design is through computational algorithms, it should be noted that the idea of parametricism is far more sophisticated than using computer instead of drawing boards (Ceborski, 2010). In order to understand the sophistication needed for the use of Parametricism in design, let us have a brief look on how the idea of Parametric Design was developed.

WHAT POSSIBLY TRIGGERED AND DRIVES THE IDEA OF THE USE OF PARAMETRICISM IN ARCHITECTURE?

1.      Surface Composition

By revisiting historical examples from veins of architecture that have previously pursued (unintentionally) the idea of parametricism, I can understand its significance as a reference for architects such as Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, Herzog and de Meuron, Weil Arets and other parametric practioners, who in contemporary times attempt to reopen the general issue of surface composition as a “legitimate” aspect of design, after almost a century of (near) omission by modernism.

Take Islamic architecture as an example, being particularly relevant due to its avoidance of representational iconography in favour of highly sophisticated geometry and pattern, there is a significant use of algorithm which produces hierarchy and movement which consequently constitutes a whole. Although its use was only applied on two-dimensional canvas due to the absence of necessary technology for a three-dimensional representation, its relevance is clear and observable throughout the 21^st Century surface pattern design through parametricism.

One lesson that I can take from examples such as the surface articulations of this mosque is a reminder of the clarity of intent required to compel us to fight beyond the easier products of our tools, as opposed to a forfeiture of authority to the tools.  The more sophisticated our tools, the more difficult this becomes.

Aranda/Lasch: Rules of Six, Installation of MoMA, New York, 2008

Zaha Hadid's Architects: Civil Courts of Justice, Madrid, 2007

2.      Space of Movement

In 1996 Patrik Schumacher discussed the idea of “The Architecture of Movement” by questioning the conventional exception of observing the system of movement as a key to space in architecture and the escaping from the architectonic system. This seeming “revolt” against the conventional rules in architecture design dimension, e.g. the reference on Cartesian grid and presupposing points of connection, deviates the perception of space from the compartmentalized and objectivity of space. Hence, the idea of “subjectivity” and “freedom” that registers and thinks itself against the framework of an institutionalising "architecture" (Schumacher, 1996).  

Schumacher justified this idea as a birth given by the technology of architecture, while asserted the fact that the idea emerged in the 18^th Century, during the trend of artificial reconstruction of nature, although the configuration of space of movement were derived through “playfulness” and not through viable systematic approach. 

3.      Radicalism

Zaha Hadid's Kartal-Pendik Masterplan, 

Istanbul, Turkey, 2006

The importance of Zaha Hadid’s persistent radicalism for the last 20 years of architectural experimentation to the culture of architecture lies primarily in a series of momentous expansions - as influential as radical - in the range of spatial articulation available to architects today. Her conquests for the design resources of the discipline include representational devices, graphic manipulations, compositional manoeuvres, spatial concepts, typological inventions and the suggestion of new modes or patterns of inhabitation.

Through these contributions, Hadid aimed to describe a causal chain that significantly moves from the artificial to the significant and thus reverses the order of ends vs. means assumed in normative models of rationality.

The point of Hadid’s engagement in this idea is the assumption of a new medium (multi perspective projection) which allows for certain graphic operations (multiple, over-determining distortions) which then are made operative as compositional transformations (fragmentation and deformation) leading to a new concept of space (magnetic field space, particle space, distorted space) which suggests a new phenomenology, navigation and inhabitation of space no longer oriented along prominent figures, axis, edges and clearly bounded realms.

WHAT ARE THE CONSTRAINTS IN PARAMETRICISM?

1.         Segmentation
While some architecture theorists and practitioners still convey and understand the idea of parametricism simply about parametric design and its potentials, Richard Coyne pointed out the need to clarify the existence of its constraints. He explained that much of the skill in parametric design resides in establishing the relationship between parameters, and the fact that constraints are the key to the idea of parametric design.

In a design based on parametric approach, each segments and parts of a design is interrelated. In this case, we are emphasizing on the physical aspect, where the changes in parts of a design affects the other parts due to the continuity and flow achievable within the fixed parameter suggested by the design synthesis. Various parameters and constraints will interact and therefore restricts the limitless probability of forms as falsely understood by some people.

2.         Bigger Blobs

Philip Steadman's The Automatic
Generation of Minimum Standard
House Plans (1970)

The complexity of parametric design gets even more compounded in the case of designing bigger structures or entities, such as whole houses or hospitals. Not only are real buildings made up of many geometrical relationships and constraints, but also involve the selection and arrangement of many parametric components.

Graham Shawcross has illustrated the so-called combinatorial problem (“explosion” of results) of arranging rooms in a house, or perhaps just dividing a rectangle into a series of smaller rectangles. There are millions of ways of dividing a rectangle into just a dozen sub-rectangles. It’s not just a problem of enumerating all those possibilities, but of sifting, sorting and selecting the best or most suitable for some purpose or other.

3.         “Wicked” Designs
Another type of issues of programs, constraints, combinatorics and limitations which are well known to those within the area of parametric design are the case of the ill-defined, “wicked” and random configuration of constraints imposed by environment, context, people, competing stakeholders, social norms, and cultural practices.

Although there are parametric definitions of crowds, swarms and mobs, but nothing has yet to cover the aspects that models human sociability and responses to environments in total — the stuff of architecture. This constraints in Parametricism explains why parametric design only flourishes in the production of elegant sweeping building facades and continuous organic roof structures, rather than floor plans, circulation routes, and subtle spatial interventions. With skins, surfaces and sculptural abstractions the constraints and their interdependencies are more amenable to algorithmic control, unencumbered by issues of use, history, culture, politics, and the complexities of human inhabitation.

CONCLUSION

These issues of programs, constraints, combinatorics and limitations are well known to anyone who has worked in the area of parametric design. It’s no wonder that parametric design flourishes in the production of elegant sweeping building facades and continuous organic roof structures, rather than floor plans, circulation routes, and subtle spatial interventions. With skins, surfaces and sculptural abstractions the constraints and their interdependencies are more amenable to algorithmic control, unencumbered by issues of use, history, culture, politics, and the complexities of human inhabitation.

Reference:

Kaplan, D (2011), Safavid Surfaces and Parametricism, Achinect Features,
extracted from http://archinect.com/features/article/29553480/safavid-surfaces-and-parametricism

Schumacher, P (2000), In Defence of Radicalism - On the Work of Zaha Hadid, City Visionaries, Venice Biennale of Architecture, Catalog for the British Pavilion, Cornerhouse Publications, Manchester

Schumacher, P (1996), The Architecture of Movement, ARCH+ 134/135, Wohnen zur Disposition, Dezember 1996 German: Architektur der Bewegung

Coyne, R (2014), What’s Wrong With Parametricism, Reflections on Digital Media & Culture. Extracted from http://richardcoyne.com/2014/01/18/whats-wrong-with-parametricism/

http://www.rethinking-architecture.com/introduction-parametric-design,354/

http://richardcoyne.com/2014/01/18/whats-wrong-with-parametricism/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EhjUli4cYEg