Topologies of Beauty: From the Ugly to the Horrific

It is impossible to think of design and mathematics as separate terms after the advent of digital design into architecture; calculus is embedded in the operations that gave rise to a new way of performing in design. The tool does not represent, it engenders; it is a technical apparatus that insers a generative mechanism; it is a technique. This approach to design through technique has transcended the problem of representation and proved to be an effective design tool. Given that the software is in fact a tool that pertains to a large degree the highest control of the manipulations of formal strategies, we can assert that we are in fact within a terrain of form and proportion. Thus what digital design has brought into the fore is a model of form in continuous change, a mindset of variation where we no longer think of a unique idea or design but rather particular strategies for design. The new technology brought up a new vocabulary of forms and tools along with a new aesthetic. If taditional architecture needed to determine the degree to which a particular project had achieved its extent of beauty, digital architecture would dig into the ugly and the horrific as ways of material shock, the ugly being a reverse mechanism of a more traditional beauty (a polarity that merges into one) and the horrific as a will to anguish, to a more appalling encounter with the work. From the ugly to the horrific, it is intuition through technique that creates a provocation in the material to create distress, as shocking effects have a resonance beyond the particularities that bring them on.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hernán Díaz Alonso

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