*What happens when parametric architecture gets too cheap and too easy? Karrie Jacobs wonders.
*I think I already know, but it's nice to see the issue being raised here. Note that the cover of this month's METROPOLIS is a "twenty-thousand-dollar house" made out of scrap. Is there a reason that isn't parametric technokitsch scrap yet? Yes... because it isn't 2015 yet.
http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20090722/off-the-shelf-genius
(...)
"On my first day at SmartGeometry, I sat through six hours of presentations in a hotel ballroom in which young scholars and designers showed buildings, mostly unbuilt. It was architecture as mesh, as neural network, as high-strength knitted fabric. Apparently, everything GenerativeComponents spits out is an undulating surface composed of myriad polygons, suggesting that the entire man-made world will soon resemble the ceiling of the Beijing airport. It wasn’t until a midafternoon coffee break that I cornered someone, a writer for an Australian architecture magazine, and asked, “What does parametric actually mean?”
"He explained—slowly—that software responds to the information you feed it about the program of a building, its proportions, its materials, and how it needs to perform. You might, for instance, influence a building’s form by inputting data about energy use or seismic conditions. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Oh, you mean parameters?”
"Or as Dr. Robert Aish, who developed GenerativeComponents for Bentley and has since become the director of software development for Autodesk, later told me, parametric software calculates the relationships between things. If you change the size of one component, the rest of the building adjusts accordingly. “If I draw a circle with a particular radius and then change the radius, that circle will update. If I made that circle define a roof, the whole roof will update.”
"I was reminded of my first encounter with parametric software, back when it went by a different name. In 1998 I interviewed three architects whose computer-driven approach was, at the time, associated with Columbia’s paperless studios: Greg Lynn, Michael McInturf, and Douglas Garofalo. They had designed a strangely shaped church for a Korean con gregation in Queens, and they insisted that they didn’t start out with a particular aesthetic in mind but rather fed data about the building’s requirements into a computer, using software that responded to the data by drawing rounded shapes. At the time, this approach was characterized as “blob” architecture.
"But GenerativeComponents isn’t really a direct descendant of the blob..."
