Architecture and the New Elegance

Catalog description

This design seminar will define and elaborate on the following topics for the digital discourse - the contemporary diagram, technique, structural thinking, systemic thinking and aesthetic projections. Technological innovations establish new status quos and updated platforms from which to operate and launch further innovations. Design research practices continually reinvent themselves and the techniques they use to stay ahead of such developments. Reinvention can come through techniques that have already been set in motion. Mastery of techniques remains important and underpins the use of digital technologies in the design and manufacturing of elegant buildings. But, ultimately, a highly sophisticated formal language propels aesthetics. The repositioning of design intent and the complex order generated by the behavioral techniques of multi-agent systems has implications for the affects which are generated as well as the nature of hierarchy within architecture. The distributed non-linear operation of swarm systems intrinsically resists the discrete articulation of hierarchies within Modern architecture and contemporary parametric component logic. The bottom-up nature of swarm systems refocuses tectonic concerns on the assemblage at the micro scale rather than the sequential subdivision of program or form. The seminar will explore strategies for high population agent models through the use of lightweight algorithmic environments, in particular the Java-based platform Processing.