BiOrganic design. A new method for Architecture and the City

Over the last twenty years, many architects have proclaimed a new design philosophy, based on the emergent condition of complex-systems science, which opposes conventional analytical methodology, or reductionism, and non-linear processes including computer aided design.

There are people who claim that with the support of computers, entire new forms of design have become possible and there are people who believe that computers have even modified the creative processes and the design theory. In this sense, architects are involved in scientific investigations of artificial life, genetic algorithms and neural network programs.

Artificial Intelligence - supporting the development of digital systems, both those produced for self-generated architectures as well as those for drawing topological transformation in the Euclidean space - is evolving faster than human intelligence and there are numerous studies stating, that it is only a matter of time before our machines become smarter than us .

The use of digital systems for animation, on which programs such as ALIAS and MAYA are conceived, nevertheless have had a liberating and cathartic effect enabling architects to draw and control unusual shapes with high levels of complexity.
.

Figure: Makoto Sei Watanabe, Iidabashi Raiway Station.

About the author
Alessandra Capanna is an Italian Architect living and working in Rome. She has taken her degree in Architecture at University of Rome 'La Sapienza', from which she also received her Ph.D, discussing a thesis entitled "Strutture Matematiche della Composizione", concerning the logical paradigms in music and in architecture. She is the author of Le Corbusier. Padiglione Philips, Bruxelles (Universale di Architettura 67, January 2000), on the correspondence between the geometry of hyperbolic paraboloids and technical and acoustic needs, and its final and aesthetics consequences. Among her published articles on mathematical principles both in music and in architecture are "Una struttura matematica della composizione", remarking the idea of self-similarity in composition; "Musica e Architettura. Tra ispirazione e metodo", about three architectures by Steven Holl, Peter Cook and Daniel Libeskind; and "Iannis Xenakis. Combinazioni compositive senza limiti", taken from a lecture given at the Dipartimento di Progettazione Architettonica e Urbana at the University of Rome.
.

previous abstract

top of page