Form Finding — A parametric love story
The premise of Parametricism is that all urban and architectural
elements must be parametrically malleable.
Instead of assembling rigid and hermetic geometric figures — like all previous architectural styles — Parametricism brings malleable components into a dynamical play of mutual responsiveness as well as contextual adaptation. Key design processes are variation and correlation. Computationally, any property — positional, geometric, material — of any architectural element can be associated with — made the “cause” or “effect” of — any other property of any other element of the design.
Many say that the parametric form is too complex and are highly opposed to its usage in form creating or as a building typology in architecture due to high execution costs, inability to adapt, and lack of responsiveness.
Materialized Perception
The project started with films of crowded scenes of weekend shoppers on Mariahilfer Straße near Vienna’s Westbahnhof. The traces of sequential movements of people within sequential film stills establish a complex motion diagram that is later scripted as a design tool. Thus the whole environment is developed as an extracted as well an eroded mass derived from the figurative pattern of the initial analysis.
The dance of forms and environment.
Nonetheless, the long-term value of parametrically built structures has performed well. The usage of Parametricism as form-making affords space usage in a way that responds to the environment rather than the other way around. The parametric approach has the advantage of allowing input parameters to be readily and quickly changed.
Nonetheless, the long-term value of parametrically built structures has performed well. The usage of Parametricism as form-making affords space usage in a way that responds to the environment rather than the other way around. The parametric approach has the advantage of allowing input parameters to be readily and quickly changed.
To optimize the design, the architect has two options: manually modifying geometry, building materials, and building services, or using an optimization solution.
These may have been the motivations driving the creation of CAD software that prioritized parametric modeling. The parametric approach has the advantage of allowing input parameters to be readily and quickly changed. To optimize the design, the architect has two options: manually modifying geometry, building materials, and building services, or using an optimization solution.
From the beginning, Calculations that were not achievable using Gaudi and Otto’s analog parametric models were made possible by the digitalization of computing. Ivan Sutherland wanted to utilize computers to speed up the calculation of any parametric equation, similar to how Gaudi and Otto employed physical laws to speed up the calculation of chosen parametric equations.
Sutherland (1963, 8) aimed to develop a system that would allow “a man and a computer to converse.” The concept of an interactive digital model was a bold vision at a period when computers worked in batch mode and programming seemed like “writing letters” (Sutherland 1963, 8). Sutherland harnessed the TX-2 computer’s computational capabilities to create Sketchpad, the first interactive computer-aided design program.
In another vein, Patrik Schumacher attempted to create a theoretical framework for how this otherworldly but intriguing realm of architecture may be harnessed, however so parametricism doesn’t suffer the fate of the postmodern movement he sought to accomplish the “The task of theoretical unification in a comprehensive recasting of the familiar architectural concepts in rather abstract terms. Perhaps the peculiarity and distinctiveness of the theory of architecture presented in his work-induced an initial endurance of intellectual vertigo, perhaps even nausea”.
He also opined in the forward of the book autopoiesis of architecture “It is hard to avoid this effect in an attempt to introduce a new theoretical vocabulary and build up a systematic theoretical edifice that is intended to cover and reinterpret the familiar theoretical apparatus, recuperate accumulated insights, capture emergent trends and produce new, original insights in order to steer architecture into pertinent but yet uncharted pursuits. The strangeness of the theoretical language is a necessary part of any genuinely new perspective.”
But as it was within the annals of his work I do believe this is necessary to further the vocabulary of Architecture and to define it for generations to come, because of the convergence and cross-pollination of familiar disciplines into contemporary forms of design — it will be hard to see where one line started and the other ends.
Architectural critic Rowan Moore has attempted to cut through the jargon in an interview with Schumacher–and the picture he paints is not a promising one. After an introduction in which Moore describes Schumacher as more or less the Peter Thiel of architecture–a fan of “unfettered capitalism,” an unabashed nationalist in a largely liberal profession–he tries to get a straight answer on a simple question: what is parametricism? Writes Moore:
Despite Schumacher’s penchant for explaining parametric design in what Moore describes as an “impressive but impenetrable string of polysyllables,” Moore manages to boil it down. Essentially, he writes, it’s a way of “designing buildings in such a way that every element can change in response to the multiple parameters,” such as how the building is used, or the duration of time people inhabit it. These designs rely on computers to “both to process complex information and to conceive complex architectural shapes.”
Using algorithms to design complex and adaptable buildings that will be perfectly suited to users seems like a sound-enough philosophy. Yet in practice, Moore contends, the enormous, curvaceous, largely steel buildings that Schumacher and Hadid designed parametrically are neither relatable nor especially adaptable. He points toward Hadid’s Riverside Museum in Glasgow as an example, a building whose zig-zag, zinc-clad roof makes it visually spectacular, but not any easier to navigate or inhabit as a museum.
These are the kind of pushbacks that reflect the ridicule of the parametric approach albeit in the name of architectural critique. It is worthy of note that the proponents of this architectural movement were trained by the masters who were at their peak at the turn of the end of modernism as a solution to the housing problem. In essence, the next generation of thinkers who were supposed to shape the future was handed ruins of an old order.
This is further elucidated in Schumacher’s position of architecture theory as a mechanism of retention. In other words the reaction of this generation to the mass appeals and systems of building available to us in terms of computational design is parametricism.
“As mechanisms of retention, we can identify canonizing architectural histories of the recent past, ordinary schools of architecture 6 and the inertia of institutionalized mainstream practice. Two exemplary retrospective canonizations that facilitated retention/reproduction were, for example, Hitchcock and Johnson’s The International Style and Jencks’ The Language of Post-Modern Architecture .
Both works are insightful distillations that could look back upon a decade of accomplished avant-garde design and theory. Such works of contemporary architectural ‘history’ reconfirm the selections achieved by earlier theory and help to push the new achievements into the mainstream. Once certain innovations have entered the mainstream — with the initial help and continuous sustenance of canonizing histories and supported by educational curricula — they tend to stay there until pushed out by new innovations brought forward by new avant-garde design and new theory.
Only when these innovations have reached the stage of reproduction should we speak of evolutionary achievements within the discipline of architecture.
This is the case for parametric as an evolution of form making.
Bibliography
Al-Azzawi, T, and Al-Majidi, Z. “Parametric Architecture: The Second International Style.” IOP Conference Series. Materials Science and Engineering 1067.1 (2021): 12019. Web.
Hollberg, Alexander, and Ruth, Jürgen. “LCA in Architectural Design — a Parametric Approach.” The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment 21.7 (2016): 943–60. Web.
Garcia, Mark. Future Details of Architecture. London, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Architectural Design (London, England : 1971). Web.
Schumacher, Patrik. The Autopoiesis of Architecture. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2011. Internet resource.
